Re: [IAEP] Sugar Cereal?
Cross-posting to Marketing, since this is a marketing idea :-) It's true that cereal-box promotion is the ideal platform for marketing to children, especially as prescriptors (Papa, I want Sugar Coated Frosted Bombs instead of Extra Sugar Hyper Doobs because there's a scary tarantula hidden in the box.) For this reason, cereal-box placement usually involves a big fat payment. Of course, sometimes charitable messages are accepted for free. However, companies are very leery of any association which could impact their brand negatively... such as software which doesn't work. Until fairly recently, Windows XP executables were the usual choice of cereal-box promoters. Lately however, with the marketshare gains of Apple, Flash is preferred more and more. I have never seen any GNU/Linux software on a cereal box, not surprising due to the marketshare problem. What could work is finding a new bio or fairtrade retailer brand. Retailers are always trying to expand in the bottom of the market, taking share from major brands. To grow a new launch, a retailer might be willing to give the space away. However, there are problems with that too... distribution would be limited to a single retailer. And we are positioning Sugar as premium quality in K-6, even if not ready for widescale deployment yet; bottom-shelf placement might not be ideal. But I do think bio / fairtrade cereal would work... in particular because there won't be tons of added sugar, a downside to the perception of traditional cereals... Sean On Mon, Oct 5, 2009 at 5:55 AM, Benjamin M. Schwartz bmsch...@fas.harvard.edu wrote: Cereal companies routinely include CDs and DVDs in their cereal boxes if they think it will help them to sell more cereal. What greater way to make your cereal more popular than to add Sugar? The bootable DVD could include many Activities, including a fast version of offline wikipedia. I'm not sure that our live CD/DVD stack is yet polished to the point that it can reasonably be distributed to millions of people, but I think we are not far, given the motivation. The trickier thing is to convince a cereal distributor of the idea. I leave that as an exercise to the reader. --Ben P.S. We might have to employ a different branding if Sugar is a problematic name in this context. ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Paint and Transparent Backgrounds
Tim McNamara writes: 2009/10/5 Caroline Meeks caroline at solutiongrove.com Could we set Paint to have a transparent background on images as a default rather then white? That would make it easier to layer different drawings and have them interact. Is that difficult programatically? Can people think of places where having a transparent background will be a problem? It's trivial programatically, but a problem for a kid's GUI. This adds all sorts of complexity. If you want that, use GIMP. Other things to NOT ask for: layers, channels, physical resolution, non-square pixels, zoom, painting bounded by selection, scrolling, user-defined canvas sizes, and maybe even cut-and-paste! On the other hand, you should expect stereo sound. :-) What format does Tux Paint save in? If it can save in PNG, then setting the alpha layer to #00 (or is it #ff - must check!) should be fairly straight forward. If we wanted this functionality by default, it may need cooperation from the upstream developers. For drawings, Tux Paint normally uses PNG without an alpha layer. The stamps (clip art) are normally PNG with alpha, meaning that you currently need something like the GIMP to create a stamp. There has been talk of changing things for the specific case of stamp creation. Tux Paint remembers the initial background image. This could allow the background image to be subtracted out, even with the anti-aliasing that Tux Paint uses for everything. The result would then be made available as a stamp. There are problems, some of which could perhaps be mostly solved by having more than one stamp creation button. Consider the case of a simple unfilled circle. Do you want the middle opaque? Now suppose the user draws a gray object on a white background. Is that to be opaque gray, or partially transparant black? ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
[IAEP] Sugar on RedHat or Zentos?
Hi, does anybody know if there will be a Sugar on RedHat or Zentos? A colleague of mine would like to run Sugar on Sun Thin Clients. If noone is working on that right now, can you tell me how difficult it would be build the Sugar port? We can try to find a interested student at our university. Greetings, Rita -- Rita Freudenberg FIN-ISG Otto-von-Guericke-Universität Magdeburg http://isgwww.cs.uni-magdeburg.de/isg/rita.html ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Sugar on RedHat or Zentos?
Rita Freudenberg wrote: Hi, does anybody know if there will be a Sugar on RedHat or Zentos? A colleague of mine would like to run Sugar on Sun Thin Clients. If noone is working on that right now, can you tell me how difficult it would be build the Sugar port? We can try to find a interested student at our university. *wave* :) I had been planning to take on this, but it actually depends on when RHEL 6 is released. The current Gnome-stack that RHEL 5 (and that way of course CentOS, too) ships is somewhat too old for Sugar, so we'd be ending up in a dependency hell. Since RHEL 6 is possibly going to be based on something like F11 or F12, it will ship versions that we can work with, though. Greetings, Rita Cheers, --Sebastian ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [Marketing] Sugar Cereal?
For what it is worth, Chuck and I have been pursuing a major cereal company for a while about putting Sugar in every box. Stay tuned. -walter On Mon, Oct 5, 2009 at 2:02 AM, Sean DALY sdaly...@gmail.com wrote: Cross-posting to Marketing, since this is a marketing idea :-) It's true that cereal-box promotion is the ideal platform for marketing to children, especially as prescriptors (Papa, I want Sugar Coated Frosted Bombs instead of Extra Sugar Hyper Doobs because there's a scary tarantula hidden in the box.) For this reason, cereal-box placement usually involves a big fat payment. Of course, sometimes charitable messages are accepted for free. However, companies are very leery of any association which could impact their brand negatively... such as software which doesn't work. Until fairly recently, Windows XP executables were the usual choice of cereal-box promoters. Lately however, with the marketshare gains of Apple, Flash is preferred more and more. I have never seen any GNU/Linux software on a cereal box, not surprising due to the marketshare problem. What could work is finding a new bio or fairtrade retailer brand. Retailers are always trying to expand in the bottom of the market, taking share from major brands. To grow a new launch, a retailer might be willing to give the space away. However, there are problems with that too... distribution would be limited to a single retailer. And we are positioning Sugar as premium quality in K-6, even if not ready for widescale deployment yet; bottom-shelf placement might not be ideal. But I do think bio / fairtrade cereal would work... in particular because there won't be tons of added sugar, a downside to the perception of traditional cereals... Sean On Mon, Oct 5, 2009 at 5:55 AM, Benjamin M. Schwartz bmsch...@fas.harvard.edu wrote: Cereal companies routinely include CDs and DVDs in their cereal boxes if they think it will help them to sell more cereal. What greater way to make your cereal more popular than to add Sugar? The bootable DVD could include many Activities, including a fast version of offline wikipedia. I'm not sure that our live CD/DVD stack is yet polished to the point that it can reasonably be distributed to millions of people, but I think we are not far, given the motivation. The trickier thing is to convince a cereal distributor of the idea. I leave that as an exercise to the reader. --Ben P.S. We might have to employ a different branding if Sugar is a problematic name in this context. ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep ___ Marketing mailing list market...@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/marketing -- Walter Bender Sugar Labs http://www.sugarlabs.org ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Accessing the hard drive of the host machine from a Virtual Box Sugar ?
Hi Gary, Thanks, I made progress. Now I am getting I am getting mount: unknown filesystem type 'vboxsf' any thoughts? http://screencast.com/t/oT7bZaKPpm0 On Sun, Oct 4, 2009 at 6:58 PM, Gary C Martin g...@garycmartin.com wrote: Hi Caroline, On 4 Oct 2009, at 23:42, Caroline Meeks wrote: Does anyone know how to bring files from the host's hard drive (I am on a Mac) into a Sugar running in Virtual Box? Sure. FWIW it's all in the VirtualBox help pdf (just go to the Help menu, and the Contents...) The quick route is: 1) Make sure you're not running or saved the sugar VM (can't change settings unless it's off) 2) Select your Sugar VM and open Settings 3) Select Shared Folders 4) Hit the + folder icon, choose a folder path (the pop-up has a standard Mac dialogue if you click Other...) 5) Give it a name, say shared_with_sugar (I don't usually tick the read-only as it is useful both ways) 6) You're done with settings, so launch your VM 8) In a VM Terminal window type mkdir ~/shared_directory sudo mount -o uid=500 -t vboxsf shared_with_sugar ~/shared_directory 9) You'll now see any shared files in here Next time you reboot the VM you'll need to just run the above mount command again. You can obviously point this set-up anywhere, so you could share ~/Desktop from your Mac to the VM somewhere, just depends how you work. Personally I just have a Sugar folder with all my Sugar related work. Regards, --Gary -- Caroline Meeks Solution Grove carol...@solutiongrove.com 617-500-3488 - Office 505-213-3268 - Fax ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
