Re: [sugar] XO identity shared via Browse
Hi All, I'm copying in Devel and will drop the sugar list on further replies (hope that's the right netiquette in this case...). Of all the e-mails I have sent this week I never would have guess that this one would generate the most responses! Maybe it was the use of the term SSO :( I updated the requirements to address Michael's comments below. The one which did not engender a requirement update are noted here: what software, on the XO, should be responsible for proving identity? GS - It says Browse and I mean only Browse (that's why I sent it to the sugar list initially) if Browse, how does Browse talk to the registration code? if Browse, what about Gmail, Help, WikiBrowse, ... GS - Not a requirement either way on registration code. Not a requirement to work with Gmail, Help or Wikibrowse, but I left in other server (Gmail case?) as nice to have. when should we make use of an ability to prove user identity? GS - Not sure what this is asking. Its purpose is to make it easier to work with XS. The identity should be tied to the XO hardware (except as noted below). I want the XS to know that its talking to the same XO as before without the user needing to enter anything. security) who are the principals? what are their goals? what attacks concern us? GS - In general I don't want any other devices to be able to appear to be the XO. We can assume that the XS - XO is a secure network not visible to the outside workd (whether that is true in practice is another story). So I moved the encryption and stringent security requirements to the optional case where the XO is talking to a non-XS server. users) what do we do if something looks wrong? fail silently? log an error somewhere? fail loudly? are there any user overrides? GS - Make sure it never fails! Just kidding. Give me some concrete examples for how it might fail and I'l think about it some more. can I turn this off? GS - Good suggestion. Added. can I have multiple identities? can I share my identity with someone else? GS - No for both. The XO is the indentity. what happens if the user loses their laptop and gets a new one? what happens if the server breaks and a new one is installed? what happens if I move from an old school to a new one? what happens when the XO's software is upgraded? downgraded? GS - I added two server side requirements to cover this. In general, I assume the XS is secure and that any identity data can be passed securely from one XS to another. HTHs. Good questions and let me know if the requirements are still not clear. BTW This came up because the current XS restore interafce requires that you type in the serial number of the XO to find its backed up files. There was also a request on the server list to make the backup and restore secure (hidden from devices other than the backed up XO). That is the must have requirement. The use of password less identity outside the secure environment of the school is nice but not critical. Just have the kids log in once then use cookies or HTTPS or OpenID for that, I'm not partial to the technology and if there's no consensus we can live without it. I'm OK with the debate but if we release 9.1.0 without making it easy to get your files off the XS and to automaticaly associate with the right Moodle identity, then we will miss an important user valuable feature. Thanks, Greg S Michael Stone wrote: On Tue, Dec 02, 2008 at 03:56:06PM -0500, Greg Smith wrote: We're mostly thinking of the school server as the server side but a more generic solution may be acceptable. I'm relatively comfortable with our vague identity plans for the XS but I'd like to know more about your idea for a more generic solution before going further in that direction. That's one example. I would also like any Web server to be able to extract the XO identity and use it in CGI (e.g. PHP) for processing. What could possibly go wrong? -- anonymous. I put a stub of a requirement for it on our roadmap here: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Feature_roadmap#Single_Sign_on_from_Browse This seems decent so far. Do you have any ideas or designs for how we can achieve that? We discussed it at SugarCamp. The essential idea from that discussion was to have the XO and the XS exchange certs at registration time so that they can later prove their identities to one another on demand. The tricky bits involve scope, security, users, and maintenance: scope) what are we proving identity to? e.g.: one single XS, ever. one single XS, whichever we're currently registered with several servers at once other XOs what software, on the XO, should be responsible for proving identity? if Browse, how does Browse talk to the registration code? if Browse, what about Gmail, Help, WikiBrowse, ... if something else, how does the something else talk
Re: [sugar] Collaboration Goals (was [Sugar-devel] XO identity shared via Browse)
Hi Robert et al, We really appreciate your staying engaged with the project and we still need your help along with that of Guillaume! Thanks a lot for sticking with us, despite the often acerbic nature of the lists :-( There are many moving parts and lots of difficult problems here. I don't know how to solve them all. I thought we were making some constructive progress on another thread recently. We have one more shot to make this area a lot better for 9.1.0. Let's have at it one more time and give it our best effort for the kids benefit. They think its magical and inspiring when it works: http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/olpc-sur/2008-May/000118.html I wrote the requirements here: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Feature_roadmap#Synchronous_Collaboration Please let me know if any of that is not clear. Then let's get a specification together which explains all the work we can/should do to meet those requirements and track it there. Any updates, comments or edits to the requirements are welcome. Since many different groups need to work together, I encourage everyone to document their plans in the same place. We're close. I think we improved the scale in 8.2. If the XOs could reliably see each other in the Neighborhood we would have the main feature set in place. Hang in there! Its time for one more round of bug scrubbing and hard work to reap the benefits of long years reading the dreary e-mail lists :-) Thanks, Greg S C. Scott Ananian wrote: On Thu, Dec 4, 2008 at 5:34 PM, Robert McQueen [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I really don't think these kind of comments are productive for anyone. [...] However, I'm not interested in participating (therefore I have not done so) in participating in discussions about collaboration on Sugar which a) ignore everything we've done so far, and b) contain fallacies such as: * Given a working IPv6 network, we... * Given a global DNS hirachy of school servers, we... * ... Whoa, there. Please don't drag me into this, and force me to rebut. We have a perfectly working link-local IPv6 network on every deployment we've ever fielded. And you (further on in your email) state so provided the school server actually has a unique DNS name, we're all set. which sounds suspiciously like your second fallacy. We've had a fruitful discussion of http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Network_principles in the past, and you made several good suggestions which I integrated. I don't think the Network principles proposal is anti the current networking stack at all; it just clarifies what networking situations we will attempt to provide and support, and does a little bit to decouple presence from the rest of the collaboration stack. I hope your email was written in the heat of passion only, and doesn't reflect a fundamental misunderstanding. I was accused of having some personal malicious intent towards Collabora multiple times during Sugarcamp, and it's rather dreary to have to keep insisting that it's just not so. If we need to clarify further, let's do so in order that we can continue working together productively -- but perhaps not on this particular thread, which is perhaps currently too hot for reasonable discourse. --scott ___ Sugar mailing list Sugar@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar
[sugar] XO identity shared via Browse
Hi Tomeu and Browse engineers, Talking with Martin L recently he mentioned that you have some ideas on how the XO can communicate its identity (e.g. serial # and maybe user name) with a web server. We're mostly thinking of the school server as the server side but a more generic solution may be acceptable. The main idea is to eliminate the need for students to ever type in a user name and password. e.g. they should be able to just hit the Backup and Restore URL and see their files without having to login or find their serial number in a list. That's one example. I would also like any Web server to be able to extract the XO identity and use it in CGI (e.g. PHP) for processing. It should also be encrypted so that the XO cannot be spoofed. e.g. only the XO which backed up and can see or restore its own files (possibly with an admin override). I put a stub of a requirement for it on our roadmap here: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Feature_roadmap#Single_Sign_on_from_Browse Do you have any ideas or designs for how we can achieve that? Comments and questions welcome. Thanks, Greg S ___ Sugar mailing list Sugar@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar
Re: [sugar] OLPC Afghanistan
Hi Ebtihaj, I came across two pages in our wiki which refer to OLPC Afghanistan: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/One_Laptop_Per_Child_Afghanistan and http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OLPC_Afghanistan They are very similar but not exactly the same. Can you collapse them both in to a single page? By tradition, we use the OLPC_Afghanistan naming convention. Whatever works for you as long as we have a main, single place to look. Thanks, Greg S *** Date: Thu, 27 Nov 2008 01:50:19 -0800 (PST) From: Ebtihaj Obaidi [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [sugar] OLPC Afghanistan To: Localization [EMAIL PROTECTED], sugar@lists.laptop.org, [EMAIL PROTECTED] Message-ID: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Hi dears. finally OLPC Afghanistan started its official work from Afghanistan. For details just visit: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/One_Laptop_Per_Child_Afghanistan OR http://www.olpc.blogsky.com Sohaib Obaidi Ebtihaj BSc. (Hons.) Economics, IIIE-IIUI OLPC Afghanistan Community Development Liaison. +923349072974 [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.eqtisad.co.cc http://www.olpc.blogsky.com http://www.olpc.af ___ Sugar mailing list Sugar@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar
Re: [sugar] notes on 8.2.0, specifically 767 (was 8.2.1)
Hi Bryan, I think you have some movement on some of these. I added some more comments below. * Why is 767 noticeably slower than 703? GS - We believe that its faster than 703 but its hard to prove. Activity launch time is one variable. Since we put up an image now, that may seem slower but hopefully the time from click on activity icon to enter data in activity is lower in 767. Let me know if that is your metric or in general what makes it feel slower for you? * 767 won't connect via WEP to an AP GS - Should be possible. Which AP do you have? I think you have documented your stuff so RTFM to your web site works. Dan, Are you out there? If Bryan gets the AP info and config details, can you buy one and try to reproduce/debug his issue? I know you're not on the clock anymore but I hope I can still reach out across the pond instead of across the desk to get your help... * 767 seems to enforce rainbow more strictly than 703. This has given me major headaches when trying to make our new flash-based activities run properly on 767. GS - I think you submitted the details. Did you get an answer? I believe that Michael is out for Thanksgiving. Can someone comment on this point? http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/sugar/2008-November/010070.html Bryan, if you can't wait until next week, just keep poking the list until you get an answer. If you can wait, poke again on Mondaty anyway :-) * 767 can't connect to ejabberd on XS 0.4 because they use incompatible versions of GNU TLS. GS - Can you ask this on the server list too? How do you know they can't connect. Unless Martin et al recognize this right away you probably need to explain exactly what you did and how it failed. * Firefox 2 and 3 are only slightly sugarized. GS - True. It is what it is and no plans to make big changes here AFAIK. * It is still a pain to open access a pdf from browse and wait for the Read activity to load it, a real pain. GS - I think Sayamindu commented on this. If its not a satisfactory answer let us know. HTHs. Thanks, Greg S ___ Sugar mailing list Sugar@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar
Re: [sugar] AbiWord 2.6.5 pushed, please test!
Hi Marc, Can you make a .xo file that people can download and install via the browser on the XO? If you can post that, I think I can get a few Arabic speakers with Arabic XOs to try it out. Thanks, Greg S Date: Sun, 23 Nov 2008 23:14:44 +0100 From: J.M. Maurer [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [sugar] AbiWord 2.6.5 pushed, please test! To: sugar@lists.laptop.org Message-ID: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Content-Type: text/plain Hi all, I've just updated AbiWord to 2.6.5 in sugar-jhbuild as well as fedora's OLPC-3 branch. A public release on abisource.com will follow soonish, but we don't want to keep the kids waiting now, do we? The most important change in this release for OLPC is improved complex script rendering. To be precise: before 2.6.5, AbiWord did not always shape composite glyphs correctly. This made AbiWord unusable for languages like Arabic. So, I'd like to ask everyone familiar with such languages to test AbiWord 2.6.5. If you use the Write activity that uses libabiword 2.6.5 to test Arabic for example, then make sure to use a font that includes Arabic glyphs. DejaVu Sans does if I remember correctly[1]. We improved our rendering based on community feedback only, as none of the AbiWord developers have any knowledge of complex scripts themselves. Ergo: * We depend on your feedback! * Thanks to all who helped in the process so far. If you find any bugs, the please file a bug report at http://bugzilla.abisource.com. Extra kudos if you can reproduce it reliably :) Cheers! Marc [1] Write should default to a proper font based on the locale. It's a known 'bug'. ___ Sugar mailing list Sugar@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar
Re: [sugar] Sugar Digest 2008-11-17
Hi Walter et al, Big +1 on this sentence: the appropriation of knowledge within the context of a critical dialog is a powerful model for both learning and software development. That's an elegant formulation and IMHO it touches on a key point. I think context and participants for that dialog amongst teachers and students is well understood. On the software development side it feels like we are still working on who participates and how we generate themes for the critical dialog. I'm interested to hear any more comments or suggestions people have on that aspect. Thanks, Greg S ___ Sugar mailing list Sugar@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar
Re: [sugar] SugarCamp
Hi Marco et al, re: I'd like to propose another one: - How Sugar Labs could better work with OLPC in satisfying their customers. (Greg Smith) Marco I'm open to it if there is interest and time available. I'd likely do an open discussion with a few text only slides to focus, if that's what you want (AKA not a huge amount of preparation time). If we're overbooked, I would be inclined to cede my time to Yama for the Teacher Training discussion. If there is critical mass of interest, slot me in somewhere. I'm open Tues - Friday except for: Tuesday 10:30 - 12:30 and Wed. 9:30 - 11:30, 1:30 - 3:30. Having people come to Cambridge certainly makes it easy for us full timers (or should I say lifers? :-). I look forward to meeting everyone. Welcome to our fair city! Thanks, Greg S ___ Sugar mailing list Sugar@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar
Re: [sugar] Deadline for new modules proposals
Hi Guys, Where can I get more info on what is new in 0.83? Changelogs from GIT is OK but if there is any higher level write up (e.g. list of trac bugs resolved and features if any) that would be more helpful. Thanks, Greg S Date: Tue, 28 Oct 2008 01:24:22 +0100 From: Marco Pesenti Gritti [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [sugar] Deadline for new modules proposals To: sugar sugar@lists.laptop.org Message-ID: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Hello, I think there is no reason to introduce a deadline for new modules proposal other than the feature freeze, currently planned for December 21. We should evaluate proposals as they get in. I will give a stab to the three proposal presented so far now, so that we get the new modules in 0.83.1. Marco ___ Sugar mailing list Sugar@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar
[sugar] Use cases and work flows (was Sugar Digest 2008-10-27)
Hi Michael, Can you add your use cases on this page for tracking? http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Use_Cases That page includes some older stuff and some newer stuff so it could be re-organized and then linked from the [[Feature roadmap]] page. Let me know how it goes. I have an outstanding task on my to do list to create more detailed use cases. If you can make progress on this and keep me in the loop, I can focus on other things or other cases. I'm also interested in coming up with examples of learning interactions which we will help us define end to end workflows for XO users. So I'm interested to talk about this next month too. Thanks, Greg S *** From: Michael Stone [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [sugar] Sugar Digest 2008-10-27 To: Walter Bender [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: iaep [EMAIL PROTECTED], Sugar Mailing List sugar@lists.laptop.org, [EMAIL PROTECTED] Message-ID: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8; format=flowed On Mon, Oct 27, 2008 at 08:12:37PM -0400, Walter Bender wrote: 2. What would creating a Sugar Activity require from me and what benefits would it bring? I've been pondering this question in some depth for the last week using my list summarization problem as a model. In hopes of offering something useful to other people facing this question, I have also started an outline covering some of the challenges and goals I have discovered http://dev.laptop.org/git?p=users/mstone/summarize-activity;a=blob;f=NOTES;hb=HEAD in preparation for a talk that I intend to give on this subject in November. Would you care to speak alongside me? 7. ?Qu?? ?C?mo? ?Por qu?? ?Para qui?: We also discussed the role that a portfolio might play in Sugar. What? How? Why? For who? are questions that are part of the teacher/student discourse in Peru. They are also questions that are important to the select-reflect-perform cycle of portfolio assessment. Scott, Rafael, Sebastian and I spend quite a bit of time discussion possible approaches to building a Portfolio Activity (we agreed that it makes sense to make it a separate Activity from the Journal for the time being). My hair-brained idea is to make a Turtle-Art-like snap-together programing Activity to create narrative presentations from items selected from the Journal. I'll make some sketches in the coming days and post them to the wiki. The team at the ministry was very upbeat about portfolio tools, regardless of the implementation details. This work sounds like it complements another talk I hope to give in November describing several conversations I've had recently with a mixed tech/learning-team audience on the subject of how can small activities be combined to make bigger activities?. We have proceeded by identifying three model use cases: 1) Going on a hike: a) Making a manifest of what to take which can be refined for future trips. b) Recording beautiful scenes that I pass. c) Taking measurements at my destination. d) Returning and combining my measurements and observations with those of friends who went on similar hikes to other destinations. 2) Developing a recipe: a) Writing a recipe draft and recording the stages of preparation. b) Sending the draft to a friend who will try to follow the recipe and who will suggest improvements. 3) Running a physics jam: a) Preparing for the jam by snagging some sample physics-based activities. b) Making a new physics-based activity, perhaps by modifying one of the samples. c) Capturing developer commentaries and screenshots explaining the new activity as it is created. d) Publishing the results to, e.g., a wiki. which we are in the process of exploring with paper mockups. Questions: * Do you have favorite model interactions that you'd like to share? * Anyone else want to talk about this subject in November besides Walter and me? ___ Sugar mailing list Sugar@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar
[sugar] Proposals for XO Mini-conference Due by Monday October 27
Hi All, We are planning a mini-conference at OLPC headquarters November 17 - 21. For more information, see the conference wiki page at: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/XOcamp_2 Please post any proposals for talks directly on the wiki page at: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/XOcamp_2#Proposals Starting at the end of the day US ET, Monday October 27th we will review all proposals and begin setting the agenda for the conference. Create a new section as needed and make sure your proposed subjects for the mini-conference are on the wiki by Monday, October 27! Discussion on the lists is useful but its not enough to get a proposal on the agenda. You must also, create a section in the wiki. I will review all e-mails to the [EMAIL PROTECTED] e-mail address. I will forward any that weren't copied to the devel list and I will extract the ones that look like proposals for inclusion in the wiki. In contrast to proposals for the mini-conference, well motivated feature suggestions go on our Feature Roadmap at: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Feature_roadmap#Requirements_and_Feature_Suggestions In short, proposals for talks at the conference go on the XOcamp_2 wiki page and specific feature and coding work go on our Feature Roadmap page. This is the idea gathering phase (similar to brainstorming). Not everything on the wiki will get built but it must be on the wiki to get considered. Its up to you to add features for the roadmap and proposals for the conference! Please have at it and let me know if you have any questions. Thanks, Greg S ___ Sugar mailing list Sugar@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar
Re: [sugar] 9.1 Proposal: Persistent activity storage (Bert Freudenberg)
Hi Michael et al, I thought that starting an activity from the Home View would start it with no state preserved from the last time it was used. Starting it from a Journal entry would start it with the state of the saved (kept?) instance, including any files that we worked on before. In the first instance it may be useful to preserve some settings or options but probably not wise to always open with the same file. What kinds of persistence are we talking about here? Also, are there any activity launch time performance concerns? I want to make sure we don't slow down the launch time without a very good reason. Thanks, Greg S Message: 1 Date: Mon, 20 Oct 2008 13:33:22 -0400 From: Michael Stone [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [sugar] 9.1 Proposal: Security and Isolation To: Tomeu Vizoso [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: sugar sugar@lists.laptop.org, Devel List [EMAIL PROTECTED] Message-ID: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed On Mon, Oct 20, 2008 at 10:46:37AM +0200, Tomeu Vizoso wrote: On Fri, Oct 17, 2008 at 9:53 PM, C. Scott Ananian [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: * Persistent activity storage What does this mean? That when you resume an activity, it should come up with the same uid it had when you launched it, and with the same instance/ dir. Michael ___ Sugar mailing list Sugar@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar
Re: [sugar] Sugar Digest, Vol 28, Issue 82
Hi Marco, You should read my weekly report :-) See: http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/devel/2008-October/019997.html I can send that to the sugar list too if people want to see it here. I only discovered this one in recently and I agree that its got some very useful stuff in it. Thanks, Greg S Am I the only to have missed this paper? http://www.teachingmatters.org/evaluations/olpc_kappa.pdf The bits about the Journal makes me think that it's really the right idea, and it will rock as soon as we have a decent implementation of it. Also see the section about what they disliked... our roadmap is very much on target! Marco -- next part -- ___ Sugar mailing list Sugar@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar
[sugar] Call for Proposals for OLPC miniconference November 17-21, 2008
An OLPC miniconference will be held November 17-21, 2008 at our Cambridge offices (10th floor, 1 Cambridge Center, Cambridge, MA, USA) This week-long event will help frame our long-term software development efforts. In addition, we will work on prioritizing requirements, features and goals for the next major feature release called XO Software Release 9.1.0. Please submit proposals for topics to cover. These may include, but are not limited to: - Top concerns and requirements of users and countries including reviews of available feedback - Learning priorities and tools needed to support them - Technologies, applications and software design proposals - Process and infrastructure proposals - Current and needed research For details about the event and submission process, see the XOcamp description online. [1] Please submit 200 word descriptions of topics or sessions on the event page [2] or by emailing your ideas to [EMAIL PROTECTED] . Thanks, Greg Smith OLPC Product Manager on behalf of the OLPC development team [1] http://wiki.laptop.org/go/XOcamp [2] http://wiki.laptop.org/go/XOcamp_2#Sessions ___ Sugar mailing list Sugar@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar
[sugar] Announcing the General Availability of XO Software Release 8.2.0
Announcing the General Availability of XO Software Release 8.2.0 XO Software Release 8.2.0 was developed by OLPC engineers and the OLPC open source community. The XO and its software is the only major computing platform designed specifically for the educational benefit of children in the developing world. Release 8.2 is based on a child focused graphical interface called Sugar, a Red Hat Fedora 9 Linux operating system and OLPC customized implementations of core software including power management, wireless drivers, NAND flash file system, Open Firmware, and other components. XO Software Release 8.2.0 runs on the award winning XO Laptop. http://laptop.org/laptop/ Major new features in this release include: - A updated Home view and Journal with new options for finding and organizing activities. - An enhanced Frame for collaborating with other XOs, switching between running activities and accessing external USB sticks. - A graphical Control Panel for setting language, network, and power preferences. - An automated Software Update tool which finds the latest version of activities and updates them over the Internet. - Integration with the School Server for backup of XOs and restore of files to the Journal as needed. - New and updated translations for many languages. - A new user manual shipped with the XO as an activity. - Hundreds of bug fixes. For installation instructions and more details on the new features, see the the 8.2.0 Release Notes at: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Release_notes/8.2.0 Thanks to the many people who gave their time and energy to make this release a reality. Thanks, Greg Smith OLPC Product Manager ___ Sugar mailing list Sugar@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar
[sugar] re Journal Requirements and preparing kids (was something else)
Hi Tomeu, Thanks for asking. The product manager role is only meaningful if developers and users feel they benefit from it :-) A note on my perspective. So far I have been able to focus exclusively on XO + Sugar Software. I don't think much about other OSes on XO (e.g. Fedora or Windows) or Sugar/XO software on on other HW or OSes. Its all 8.2, 9.1 etc for me, so far. Two points: 1 - On your question of preparing kids for using computers, that has come up. It's usually in the context of the need for Windows. That is, many decision makers seem to think that learning to use Windows is an important skill to prepare people for jobs which use computers. We can try to dissuade them by pointing to Linux as the future or explaining that understanding computers is the central idea and transferable to any OS (no matter how abstracted the processes and file system :-). The main idea that the purpose of XOs is to teach kids about computers is something I think many on this list ascribe to. Others (e.g. me) look at XOs as more of a tool to learn whatever the kids want to learn, be it computers or animal husbandry or theology or whatever. Most people probably want to see some of both. FYI for earlier comment on this, see Design section of this page: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Learning_Vision and my comment on it: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Talk:Learning_Vision#Very_Inspirational I'll give one example. I heard of a small country where a trial deployment was to be funded by a large corporation. The company uses Windows and .Net. One of their goals was to find and train the bright kids who would become their future programmers so they were interested in Windows. They have other more altruistic goals too so everyone can benefit, but it gives you a sense of how this goal of learning computers is motivated. 2 - On the Journal design. I think we are closing in on a rough consensus for goals of an updated Journal. The last piece will be the hardest but let me see if we have agreement on the first two points. a - Journal/datastore must not lose data due to bugs or errors. If the user meant to save, or some part of the OS meant to save the data must be saved! I think/hope everyone is on board with that one. b - We should allow access to the file system directly. This is the point most adamantly express by John Gilmore (btw there was a round of applause by some engineers in the office on reading that one morning :-). That is, the Journal should show the full path and file name to every file. Should probably show the size and maybe other file attributes too. The file names should be human readable and accessible easily by applications and by terminal commands. It doesn't have to be the only way to see files in the GUI but it has to be easily available. That is the main way we address the question: will kids learn to use computers by having an XO? Not sure we have consensus on that but I think we are close. c - We should allow access to files via other paradigms, tags, search tools etc. This is where I think we have the most work to do. I look forward to Scott's proposal and more discussion. I said previously that I hadn't heard the need for this from the field. Elana and Erik have given solid, end user motivated feedback that ~its hard to find stuff in the Journal so I'm completely on board now. Making that better is where I think we can add the most value. Any DOS machine in the last 25 years can do the first two. IMHO point c is where we can break new ground and lead the industry. Especially if we come up with something that really resonates and works for kids and teachers. HTHs. Let's nail down point a and b above as must have, baseline functionality for 9.1. Then let's kick around as many ideas for point c as we can until we find a clear winner. Thanks, Greg S Date: Thu, 9 Oct 2008 11:16:14 +0200 From: Tomeu Vizoso [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [sugar] sugar and the digital age (was Re: notes from the field - Mongolia) To: elana langer [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: iaep [EMAIL PROTECTED], OLPC Devel [EMAIL PROTECTED],Sugar Mailing List sugar@lists.laptop.org Message-ID: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Hi Elana, On Tue, Oct 7, 2008 at 9:48 PM, elana langer [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: d) Although I think building a tagging tool around kids natural ways of thinking is really exciting, most teachers/schools/gov'ts are really concerned that this OS isn't preparing kids for the digital age properly. Most people feel it is important the computer meet some simple expectations that are common and understandable practices on any OS - like having files that can be saved and accessed in a simple place for example. could you elaborate on what means for teachers/schools/govts to prepare kids for the digital age? It may be that we are not giving enough importance to that requirement (?).
Re: [sugar] adding versions to journal/datastore
Hi Guys, This is a great discussion and very helpful design interaction! Just sampling a few items on this thread I have two high level comments: 1 - The primary requirement for the Journal is to never lose data. I think there are some known issues with the datastore but I'm not sure where they are tracked. The most important case is to not lose data when the users exits the activity or keeps. The secondary case is to do interim saves so that if the XO or activity crashes or the XO is shut down we still save something recent. Please don't try to extend the Journal paradigm until we nail, provably and completely. 2 - In terms of better organization of Journal data. It hasn't come up as a problem from the field in my experience. It can still be improved and making it easier to optimize the available storage seems like a high priority based on NAND full issues. We should still consider better data organization and access, especially if we can make something that really resonates with kids. We especially need to address saving and accessing in the collaborative creation process. The concern I have with the discussion so far is that its way too complicated. I don't think any K - 6 grade kid will have a good conception of a tree or hierarchy. It will be incomprehensible and work like black magic to them. Even the idea that the newest is at the top is not universal (see: http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/localization/2008-September/001583.html). The notion of size or quantity is not the same for a kid as an adult either. One Piaget experiment I read about showed that most kids below a certain age would assume that 5 items spread far apart were more than 6 items placed close together. Throw in many items of the same screen space each with a different size in MBs and they will completely miss that one quantity is more than the other. I don't mean to make this impossible to design. I suggest that we make sure we nail the reliability piece first. Then come up with some experiments which cover use cases and include mock-ups. Then test them with kids. If we design this based on our own understanding of what works for us, we can make something useful and interesting but it may not be optimized for kids. Optimizing for the ways kid's minds work is something we can do better than anyone else, if we can get good at it. My 2 cents. I apologize for being such a skeptic. Lately I feel like I'm swimming up stream. If the river is flowing towards consensus and we can make something short term which we can learn from, don't let me slow you down. Thanks, Greg S ___ Sugar mailing list Sugar@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar
Re: [sugar] G1G1 Pre-installed Activities Request for Help, Testing
Hi Sameer, I don't see a lot of support yet (I had to look up innumerate in the dictionary :-) but the Google spreadsheet has been very helpful for me. I like to think I'm not innumerate but I can be obdurate. I hope we keep using it and people can take what they want from it. Each release that goes to manufacturing for G1G1 shipments needs to have a set of activities pre-installed. Other deployments generally get to pick which activities they want or they start with the default G1G1 set. The same is true of the libraries that you see on the upper left of the opening Browse screen. I leave that area to SJ. In the end, which activities get shipped is up to the boss but they are open to suggestions and input. The one critical thing is that the activity must be stable and well supported. Aside from that we can make any suggestion we want and give a justification for it as we see fit. I need to find out how flexible we can be about adding or changing the activities we ship when 8.2.1 goes to manufacturing. Assuming we have some flexibility to change or add, we should start identifying the suggested changes now. I think the spreadsheet is a step in the right direction. If it can help us uncover activities that clearly stand out from the pack that would be very helpful in deciding the next set to ship. FYI one thing I learned in this exercise is that activity authors are available and interested in improving their activities for XO users. We have a little momentum now so I want to revive the excitement in the activity authoring community. I'll follow up on that, after we finish the final regression tests of 8.2. If all goes as planned, XOs will start rolling off the line with 8.2 in six days from today! Thanks, Greg S ___ Sugar mailing list Sugar@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar
[sugar] G1G1 Pre-installed Activities Request for Help Testing
Hi All, Thanks a lot for the input on which activities to ship! Here is the list of activities I will to management as my suggestion on what we ship. Please help test these! See the end of the e-mail for instructions. The list I recommend is essentially the G1G1 activities (kudos to the team who chose the first set!). In addition to those I list a few which got repeated votes (except Chess and Sudoku which are a concession to SJ ;-) Original G1G1 activities: Browse Read Write Paint Record TamTam Jam, Mini, on fence: Synthlab, Edit, Chat Pippy Etoys Turtle Art Calculate Measure Distance Memorize Terminal Log Analyze New ones: Help Implode Speak Maze SimCity Scratch Xaos StarChart Moon GCompris Chess GCompris Sudoku The only significant change from the original G1G1 set is the TamTam. I think we should include 2 not 4 so as not to over weight them against other activities. Let me know if anyone has comments on that (Jean can you live with that?). Not all of these are sure to make it. On the other hand it's very unlikely that anything else will make it. So if you have an urgent request or a specific concern please speak up now. Of course, anyone can download additional activities so even if an activity is not on this list, it still attracts a lot of users. We need help testing these with the latest 8.2 image. We plan to make a release candidate today and if it passes smoke test we will add the activities and content to create a signed release candidate on Monday! Developers, Please reply with the final version and URL of each activity which we should include in the image. Each one must pass final test and have an active and reachable developer to make the final list. Morgan, can you make sure we have a contact e-mail and name on each of these? Also, let me know if you any of them are orphaned or not well maintained. All, Please test them all one more time let us know how it goes. I want to know if each of these passes the tests described here: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Test_cases_8.2.0#Activities Please create a new test case for any activity that needs one. To do that, go to this page: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Form:Test_case and entering Tests/Activities/nameofactivity to create a new test case. Then choose activity from the drop down and you can just paste in the steps test from above for a start. Then you can add a test result by clicking on the + sign next to the test case (it takes a little while for them to show up after creation). You can also e-mail comments or test results back to this list. Thanks a lot for your help. Thanks, Greg S ___ Sugar mailing list Sugar@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar
[sugar] G1G1v2 Activities
Hi All, We need to pick the activities we ship with 8.2 when its manufactured for G1G1 users. Management needs to sign off on the final list as early as next week. Its not definitive but we want your input on what we should include. What do you think are the most important activities to include? Please pick up to 10 and put them in order of priority. We will tally the votes and use that as input to the decision. Thanks, Greg S PS this is not a scientific voting system like used recently in the sugar vote. I accept Arrow's impossibility theorem (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow%27s_impossibility_theorem) and my math foo is weak so I'm not going to try and justify the methodology. ___ Sugar mailing list Sugar@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar
Re: [sugar] Sugar deployment discussion
Hi Walter and team, This looks like an interesting meeting and I would like to go but I have a conflict at that time. Can you do Noon US ET tomorrow (Wed.) or the 10AM US ET Thursday? Thanks, Greg S Date: Mon, 8 Sep 2008 12:58:07 -0400 From: Walter Bender [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [sugar] Sugar deployment discussion To: sugar sugar@lists.laptop.org, iaep [EMAIL PROTECTED] Message-ID: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 We'll be holding an initial discussion of how Sugar Labs can more directly help with Sugar deployments on irc.freenode.net (#sugar-meeting) on Wednesday, 10 Sept. at 14 UTC (10 EST). There is a draft agenda in the wiki: http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/DeploymentTeam. Hope you can join us. regards. -walter -- ___ Sugar mailing list Sugar@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar
Re: [sugar] [PATCH] REVISED screenshots hurt (Erik Garrison)
Hi Guys, That's a winner! Thanks to Martin D for explaining that screen shots are only used in the Journal details view. That makes sense now. I leave it to Michael et al to decide if this patch is safe enough to try in the release candidate. If it improves performance as much as it appears, I think its worth serious consideration. Thanks, Greg S Date: Fri, 5 Sep 2008 01:31:54 -0300 From: Erik Garrison [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [sugar] [PATCH] REVISED screenshots hurt To: sugar@lists.laptop.org Message-ID: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Devs, Attached to this email are both the original patch, which removes automated screenshot acquisition from the sugar shell, and a patch to activity.py in sugar-toolkit which adds screenshot acquisition to the user-directed 'keep' (save) event, so that the screenshot can appear in the journal when the user explicitly selects to save their work. Note that the keep event previously did not acquire a screenshot-- it was apparently assumed that it would have been acquired previously by a tabbing event. Additionally, two screenshots were acquired on every close event (one in the Shell.py code and one in the activity.py code). The effect of these patches is to retain the benefits of screenshots without incurring their costs on every window navigation event. Only user-directed 'close' and 'keep' events now trigger the screenshot. This means that there will always be screenshots after activities properly exit, or when the user elects to save data. Other automated screenshot events are removed so that system responsiveness does not suffer during window manager navigation. before, screenshots taken on these events: - frame visibility - tabbing start - activity next tab - activity previous tab - zoom into activity view - activity close (twice) after, screenshots taken on these events: - activity close (once) - activity keep / save Comments welcome. Please test and report results. Erik -- ___ Sugar mailing list Sugar@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar
Re: [sugar] [PATCH] screenshots hurt
Hi Marco, I think its your call if this looks too invasive to stuff in the release at this stage. I think task switching is important but not super-common. The frame open and close seems much more common and slowness there can appear like slowness within the activity. Would it be possible to just take out the screenshot action on frame events? Thanks, Greg S Marco Pesenti Gritti wrote: On Fri, Sep 5, 2008 at 4:47 PM, Erik Garrison [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: By problem I was referring to the issue that the screenshots are used to resolve. I now am clear that the problem is that users can't figure out what's what in their journal without screenshots. The current patchset attempts to resolve this issue in a way that doesn't affect the performance of window change events in Sugar. I can think of a couple of limitation with your approach (aside from the implementation issue we discussed in irc, which can be easily fixed): 1 If you close the an activity while the frame is up, you will get a screenshot with some black areas. 2 If you close a non-active activity from the frame (icon palette) you would get a completely black screenshot. I would be personally fine with these imperfections to get better window management performance. Because with the current approach we can only take these screenshots while the window is visible on the screen, and taking them on window navigation events is the only way to ensure they are always updated. If the activity is still running, then why does an updated screeshot have to appear in the journal? The user can easily reach the activity by the same navigational system that takes them to the journal. That's not a big loss to me. There are a couple of ways we can take them only when saving the document: 1 Use gtk offscreen rendering (should be available in F10) 2 Use a composite manager (which has several side effects...) Can these be implemented and tested quickly? Surely not for 8.2, *maybe* for 9.1. Marco ___ Sugar mailing list Sugar@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar
Re: [sugar] [PATCH] screenshots hurt
Hi Tomeu, Pardon my ignorance but what are screenshots in this context? rtfm links welcome too. Explain what is different about what the end user would see on the screen before and after this change. Then I can ask around and get some opinions on whether this is a cost worth bearing for greater performance. Also, does this change improve the speed of every frame appearance? That has been a frustration for me. Users can turn off the frame but there's some important stuff there now (e.g. journal) so I think we need to make it work faster (especially make it go away faster). BTW Its great to see some progress on the performance front. Certainly a concern for our users. Also great to see Andres in the loop. He is one of the best engineers I have seen who can bridge the sur and devel/sugar lists. Thanks, Greg S Date: Thu, 4 Sep 2008 10:42:32 +0200 From: Tomeu Vizoso [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [sugar] [PATCH] screenshots hurt To: Erik Garrison [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: sugar@lists.laptop.org, Greg Smith [EMAIL PROTECTED] Message-ID: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 On Thu, Sep 4, 2008 at 7:29 AM, Erik Garrison [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Sugar Developers, In the field and amongst our own developers there have been numerous complaints about the performance of Sugar. One simple thing we can do to improve user experience is to stop taking screenshots on every tabbing event, every activity focus change event, and every frame appearance event. The attached patch to Sugar (most recent git head, 48dd24c6e) does simply that. Andr?s Ambrois and I have tested the changes in question on a machine running 656 and on a machine running 2263 (the most recent joyride I have available-- code in question is identical to the current sugar git head). We noted a considerable improvement in the speed and consistency of activity switching performance. These qualitative results are consistent with prior user interface profiling tests by Riccardo Lucchese, which have established that screenshot functionality occupies just shy of 50% of CPU time during activity switching [1]. Please apply the patch and test on a *REAL* machine. Please comment on the effects. Note that on recent joyride builds the appearance of the frame on every tabbing event makes it more difficult to notice the performance change. The patch looks good in that it does what intends and doesn't seem to have any unintended effect. About the convenience of totally deactivating screenshots in the next release, I think it's a decision that needs to be taken on non-technical grounds. Are we going to better serve our users' interests by doing so? Is the improvement of perceived performance worth the lost functionality? Greg, can you help on this? Note that I understand this as a temporary measure, for the next release I think we should properly address this issue. I have just added two tickets on this regard: https://dev.laptop.org/ticket/8303 https://dev.laptop.org/ticket/8304 Thanks a lot for looking into this, Tomeu ___ Sugar mailing list Sugar@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar
Re: [sugar] [PATCH] screenshots hurt
Hi Guys, OK I think I get it. Isn't the Icon in the journal always the same for any given activity? That is, any time I use and/or keep a write document it shows the same write icon. What is different about the journal icon from one write instance to another? I think we need that icon but perhaps we can just use the same one everytime... I don't want to give up the icon completely and I doubt many kids use alt-tab but we could ask on the sur list. I bet they do switch between open activities via home view and/or frame. BTW will this improve frame open and close rates? Sorry I would check this myself but I'm not in front of an XO right now (need to bring some home again ASAP). Thanks, Greg S Erik Garrison wrote: On Thu, Sep 04, 2008 at 06:50:00PM +0200, Tomeu Vizoso wrote: On Thu, Sep 4, 2008 at 6:38 PM, Greg Smith [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hi Tomeu, Pardon my ignorance but what are screenshots in this context? rtfm links welcome too. These are used in the detailed view in the journal. Explain what is different about what the end user would see on the screen before and after this change. Then I can ask around and get some opinions on whether this is a cost worth bearing for greater performance. The user would stop seeing thumbnails in the journal. The user will additionally notice that alt+tab events occur twice as fast, and the latency in switching between activities is more consistent. Also, does this change improve the speed of every frame appearance? That has been a frustration for me. Users can turn off the frame but there's some important stuff there now (e.g. journal) so I think we need to make it work faster (especially make it go away faster). Would make appear the frame faster, but wouldn't affect when it goes away. For that we would need to use composition (an intended goal for 9.1.0). Right. BTW Its great to see some progress on the performance front. Certainly a concern for our users. Also great to see Andres in the loop. He is one of the best engineers I have seen who can bridge the sur and devel/sugar lists. Agreed! He certainly is! Best, Erik ___ Sugar mailing list Sugar@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar
Re: [sugar] 0.84 goals
Hi Marco et al, This is very helpful work on planning the next release. A few high level process-like comments from me for starters. 1 - I think we need more time. I believe that I saw somewhere that we want to finalize the choice of target features by 9/7. I wont have time to devote to 9.1 (that's t he relevant release on XO, right?) for another week or two. I suggest that we give it until end of September at the earliest before we lock down the target features. 2 - Can you integrate this goal/feature set in to the 9.1 page (http://wiki.laptop.org/go/9.1.0)? That page will still be raw for another few weeks but it may be stable enough to tie this work in to it. You can just create a sugar section in the Priorities_from_Engineering or filter these in to the appropriate sections or edit the sections as needed. 3 - Can we pick a trac convention for following this work? Maybe milestone 9.1 and keyword sugar0.84 or whatever works for you so we can easily query this. 4 - Can we pick a target deployment and create use cases? I also need to figure out which specs or requirements definitions to review. Also, I saw one reference to a spec but it looked like a chunk of code when I followed the link. 5 - Can we write up some strategic goals? I like the list but I think it would help to tie it in to a strategy, maybe even an learning strategy. Here is one possibility strategy explanation: - Make Sugar/XO more reliable so that it does what the user expects more often and reduce the number of crashes and hard failures. - Make it easier for kids to share their work with each other. This includes real time sharing and passing of data from XO to XO. Also includes allow more kids to collaborate at the same time. - Make it easier to build activities for the XO Those are the ones that jump out at me from your list. One which I don't see is to improve and extend the sharing paradigm. In that vein I need to respond to an old thread with Eben on the work flow to have may kids go off, write something at home then come together and merge it in to a single shared document. There are also suggestions for having many people collect data (e.g. water temperature) and then integrate that in to a shared data analysis application. I'm sure there are other ideas. Perhaps we should brainstorm and start at the most general and then pick the high level themes. Then we refine them in to more and more specific definitions until we get a set of specific features to implement. Could be that happened already and I missed it. Even in that case we should write up something on strategy so we know where your list fits in the grander scheme of things. 6 - What about the datastore? Is that not your area? What about activities? You may want to make a scrub through the 9.1 page and flag anything which you think is in your space. If you have time wait two weeks before doing that and I will try to improve the 9.1 page soon. Those are my top suggestions at this stage. I appreciate that you are moving the ball forward. I hope to catch up in a few weeks. We only get one or at most two chances a year to build something really new. Hopefully this release will be one of those chances. Let's take a little extra time now and try to make a break through. Thanks, Greg S ** Hello, I started working on the goals for 0.84 in the wiki: http://sugarlabs.org/go/ReleaseTeam/Roadmap/0.84#Goals Here is what I have so far. * Next generation journal * File sharing * Collaboration scalability * Responsive UI * Stable activities API * Official Sugar LiveCD * Compatibility with desktop applications * Quality and reliability Each of them points to a separate page in the wiki. I'll be working on several of these pages in the next weeks, writing down requirements, designs and thoughts about resourcing. Help wanted! As you can see the scope is very large. The plan is to narrow down each item to more concrete action items and then probably punt some of the high level goals. But I really want to get a bunch of stuff done this cycle!!! I know it's very vague for now. But if something is obvious missing please let me know or edit directly. Thanks, Marco ___ Sugar mailing list Sugar@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar
Re: [sugar] Release Cycle (David Farning)
Hi David, Very constructive and encouraging e-mail! The PDF looks interesting too. Thanks, Greg S *** Date: Thu, 14 Aug 2008 13:34:44 -0500 From: David Farning [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [sugar] Release Cycle To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Message-ID: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Content-Type: text/plain Now that Sugar Labs has released .8.2 to OLPC it is time to revisit the release cycle issue. I have the feeling that most of us agree _in_principle_ to the idea that an established release cycle is important. As part of his Ph.D. Martin Michlmayr has done some interesting research on the topic. He provides a good introduction to the topic in his talk 'Open Source Speaker Series: Release Management in Large Free Software Projects'. [1] His thesis is also available. [2] Some thoughts on on how the release process applies to Sugar Labs. - Background - 1. Software engineering is hard. There is no silver bullet. No design methodology, governance process, or optimistic belief is going to ensure the success of Sugar. 2. Sugar is Open Source. 3. Sugar Labs is a community. At the end of the day, it does not matter why Sugar Labs chose the community development process. It is here and we are stuck with it;) both good points and bad points. - Stakeholders - 4. Are our stakeholder happy? The primary goal of any software project is to ensure that its stakeholders are happy. This happy is not a '70 kind of happy. Rather, it is a happy where our users continue to chose our product over similar products and contributing stakeholders feel that they have a net benefit from the time, effort, and money the invest in the project. 5. Who are our stakeholders? Currently, we can roughly divide our stakeholders into three categories: OLPC, RedHat, and Sugar Labs. It would be convenient if we could split our group cleanly into these categories. We can't. Some Sugar Labs volunteers align themselves with the OLPC goal. Some RedHat employees are under contract through OLPC. Some OLPC employees are involved in spreading Sugar beyond the XO. 6. What are our stakeholder's long term goals? Make Sugar the best, most widely available, learning environment. 7. How do we meet those goals? At its heart, this is an economic problem. All of our stake holders have unlimited wants and limited resources. - Fast, cheap, now. Chose two. - 8. What are our Stakeholder's short term goals? Disclaimer: I have no formal knowledge of anyone's goals. These are the goal I would have if I was wearing the stakeholders shoes. 8a. OLPC. Stability and predictability. OLPC is providing support for an entire deployment stack. Hardware, Software, and content. As such, they need to have a _stable_ piece of software in the field. For the next release, they need predictability. They need to know how Sugar will fit into their stack 6 months, 1 year, and more into the future. 8b. Redhat. Grow the Linux market and mindshare. Redhat has been doing a pretty good business selling subscriptions to their distribution. Their subscription model is unique in that the software is available for free and their interoperability efforts reduce the cost of leaving RedHat to $0. They want to expand the world wide market for linux by making it the best technological product. They want to associate the Fedora/Redhat brands with these efforts. 8c1. Sugar Labs. Survival. In all seriousness, our immediate goal is survival. We are faced with the challenge of retaining our current stakeholder while adding enough new stakeholders to be come self-sustaining. 8c2. Sugar Labs. Engage stakeholders to improve Sugar. We want to improve Sugar to the point that: Sugar is the platform of choice for educators. Sugar is the platform of choice for educational application developers. Sugar is the platform of choice for educational distributions. Sugar is the platform of choice for hardware developers. - Rock, Scissors, Paper - 9. For the past several months it seems that we have been using the children's game of rock, paper scissors as our decision making mechanism;) Every decision needed a winner and a loser. Now, it is time for our stakeholder representative to sit down and hash out a plan for the up coming release cycle. I am not naive enough to think that we can immediately forget our past grudges or politics. But, I am optimistic enough to think that we can agree enough to set mutual goals and allocate resources to those goal...for one release cycle. The best thing about release cycles is that in six months we can revisit our goals and asset reallocation. 1. http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5503858974016723264 2. http://www.cyrius.com/publications/michlmayr-phd.html thanks dfarning ___ Sugar mailing list Sugar@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar
Re: [sugar] Question about write from Niue -OLPC training
Hi Guys, Great question! So basic but so relevant! I don't think its just the image size, but I'm open to suggestions. I found one way using build 703 to get an image off the web and in to write. Open Browse and go to the page you want to get the image from. Then hold down the shift key and click the mouse button and hold it down. Then drag the image to the frame and drop it there. Now you should have a clipboard image stye icon on the frame. Mouse over it and choose add to the journal. Then open write, choose the image tab and click the insert image option. I don't know if that is meant to be supported (e.g. the drag and drop is not reliable in many cases) but it worked for me on 703. In my experience, there are several areas of instability you want to be aware of in the 656 and possibly 703 releases. The clipboard can get confused about what type of file it has and which one is the paste target. So I had to remove everything else from the clipboard before it decided that the image was the paste target. Even so it I couldn't paste it with control-v in to Write. When the journal is big it sometimes doesn't open. I think that is more relevant to 656 than 703 but its something to be aware of. That may block you from getting something off the journal in to write with the file chooser. Its a work around, but seemed to work for me :-) For the list, I don't know what version of Write or Browse I have on this XO. How do I determine that? HTHs. Try getting an image and text from Write on to a web page sometime too Thanks, Greg S -- Message: 3 Date: Wed, 06 Aug 2008 21:07:16 -0500 From: Bastien [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [sugar] Question about write from Niue -OLPC training To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: sugar@lists.laptop.org Message-ID: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Martin Sevior [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: Think that write might not allow the image to be imported if it is too big. Can you tell me how large the images are? What are their dimensions in pixels? We've had had the same issue in Ha?ti, with both 656 and 703 builds, and with images as taken with the Record activity (I don't know ths size and dimensions.) Is this fixed in newer (stable) builds? -- Bastien -- Message: 4 Date: Thu, 07 Aug 2008 12:22:59 +1000 From: Martin Sevior [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [sugar] Question about write from Niue -OLPC training To: grisel carreira [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: sugar@lists.laptop.org Message-ID: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Content-Type: text/plain On Thu, 2008-08-07 at 09:45 +1000, grisel carreira wrote: Hi Gary, The versions I am using are: - Sugar v.1.703 - WikiBrowse v.9, and - Write v.55. Thanks Grisel Hi Grisel, There is a good chance this is fixed in the current joyride 8.20 builds. Clearly we need to get these out to you. A work around until then would be to reduce the size of the images or to only select images that are 640x480 or smaller. I'm almost certain these will work as this is the size of images made with the camera. Cheers Martin On Thu, Aug 7, 2008 at 9:16 AM, Gary C Martin [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hi Grisel, On 6 Aug 2008, at 23:42, grisel carreira wrote: Hi there, Please let me know if I should direct the questions to someone else since I haven't received any response. (see below) Cheers, Grisel Sorry, this probably doesn't help... I'm running a very new development build (joyride-2258) and it seems to be running as hoped. Using Browse-94, visiting Google images, right clicking and selecting copy on several images into the clipboard, then starting a new Write-56 activity and dragging in the images with the mouse one by one (see attached screen shot for the not so masterpiece result). Can you say what version of the Sugar operating system you are using? Also Browse version and Write version would be good. Hi there, I am doing some volunteer work for the OLPC in Niue island. One basic activity we set up on the teacher training was to get pictures from Google images, save them to the journal and upload them into Write by using the Image tab, insert facility but it didnt work. We tried various ways: - copy the image and paste it in the 'write' document - upload to clipboard image and insert it into write - saving the image from goolge with a .jpg extension - although it will save
Re: [sugar] New joyride build 2258 (Eben Eliason)
Hi All, +1 on not reaching out over the network or doing anything without user input. I'm also nervous about the software update icon in the control panel going out over the network and doing something immediately after you click and before you do anything else with the Update interface. Is there any precedent or guidelines on what happens first after you choose a Sugar Control Panel option? Has anyone tested the SW updater control panel over low-BW or offline? I'd rather see it land on a nice GUI that explains what will happen and gives you the option to click and check for the latest activities. Thanks, Greg S -- Message: 2 Date: Wed, 6 Aug 2008 09:47:42 -0400 From: Eben Eliason [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [sugar] New joyride build 2258 Cc: Sugar Mailing List sugar@lists.laptop.org, [EMAIL PROTECTED] Message-ID: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 On Wed, Aug 6, 2008 at 7:10 AM, Build Announcer v2 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: --- Changes for sugar 0.81.8-2.20080806git0fc57309f3.olpc3 from 0.81.8-1.fc9 --- + 7495 open cp software-updater on first boot after an update I don't want this! I keep shouting about it and no one seems to be listening! Home absolutely needs to be home base, especially after an update. I'm fine with tossing up a non-modal alert at boot which prompts the user to update right away, with a button which reveals the software update control panel module, but I'm NOT OK with anything which, unbeknownst to the user, flits them away to some other part of the system without his/her consent. - Eben -- Message: 3 Date: Wed, 6 Aug 2008 15:57:31 +0200 From: Christoph Derndorfer [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [sugar] New joyride build 2258 To: Eben Eliason [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: Sugar Mailing List sugar@lists.laptop.org, [EMAIL PROTECTED] Message-ID: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 On 8/6/08, Eben Eliason [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Wed, Aug 6, 2008 at 7:10 AM, Build Announcer v2 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: --- Changes for sugar 0.81.8-2.20080806git0fc57309f3.olpc3 from 0.81.8-1.fc9 --- + 7495 open cp software-updater on first boot after an update I don't want this! I keep shouting about it and no one seems to be listening! Home absolutely needs to be home base, especially after an update. I'm fine with tossing up a non-modal alert at boot which prompts the user to update right away, with a button which reveals the software update control panel module, but I'm NOT OK with anything which, unbeknownst to the user, flits them away to some other part of the system without his/her consent. +1 Initially I was all for such first-boot features (especially with regard to G1G1 and the help-activity). But after thinking about Eben's arguments in both cases I agree that user should definitely see the home-view as the first thing when they boot the machine. Especially the Sugar-Control-Panel and its overlay above the home-view (which IIRC isn't used anywhere else in Sugar except for the Journal object chooser instead of the traditional file-choose dialogue) could be quite confusing. Cheers, Christoph - Eben ___ Sugar mailing list Sugar@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar ___ Sugar mailing list Sugar@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar
Re: [sugar] Proposal: Activity developers mailing list
Hi Bernie, I read the lists in digest except for Sur which I get individually because I was the first admin for that the list (can't seem to turn that off :-( I focus 100% on delivering the best experience possible for users of the 400K XOs shipped so far (50K more shipping every month). So I scan or read all the lists on lists.laptop.org and I try to stay up to date with wiki.laptop.org. I don't have a lot of capacity to add bookmarks to another site or follow e-mail on another mailman server or list. Like I said, if its important to XO users I'll go wherever you go, but the more we focus the project on a limited set of URLs, the better. Thanks, Greg S Bernie Innocenti wrote: Greg Smith wrote: I prefer it on lists.laptop.org. Mainly because I don't have capacity to watch lists from two mailman servers. What do you mean by this? Do you read the archives rather than subscribing to the lists? It also depends somewhat on the purpose. We need to communicate dependencies, APIs, and other things related to activities on the XO. Hopefully we can use this list for that. I agree with you: keeping developers of activities and Sugar core together on the same list might enable better mutual understanding. And the current traffic is far from scaring anybody. ___ Sugar mailing list Sugar@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar
Re: [sugar] Proposal: Activity developers mailing list
Hi Morgan, I prefer it on lists.laptop.org. Mainly because I don't have capacity to watch lists from two mailman servers. It also depends somewhat on the purpose. We need to communicate dependencies, APIs, and other things related to activities on the XO. Hopefully we can use this list for that. I am currently focused entirely on the XO and its users. That's my 2 cents but I'll follow wherever you end up, especially if you can get contact info for the people who have posted activities to: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Activities Thanks, Greg S ___ Sugar mailing list Sugar@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar
Re: [sugar] Sugar Digest, Vol 25, Issue 94
Hi Ben, Thanks for the input. I'm glad you sent this before the launch of 8.2.0 as it would be very discouraging to launch a new release then have one of the lead engineers say this sucks ;-) That said, I don't think we can address many (any?) of these things in 8.2.0 due to the constraints that Kim mentioned. I pasted this e-mail in to the 9.1.0 privatization page, engineering requests section: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/9.1.0#Priorities_from_Engineering Can you send and/or paste in to the 9.1.0 wiki links to further documentation or history on your points? These four in particular, but any other details also appreciated: - bug ids for the amazing variety of terrible bugs - Links to specifications on the 5 datastore design proposals - Links to file sharing proof of concept programs - Links to develop specs and documentation on how it works now This may be old news for others, but I don't have the details in my browser favorites or linked from my wiki pages yet. Brief comments on your top 6 items: 1 - Datastore Are you saying the current datastore has the functionality but its buggy, or that new core functionality is needed? Either way, I hear there is consensus that a major redesign is needed and its holding up other work (e.g. journal improvements). 2 - Updates I agree. Not sure when we'll freeze the OS variables require us to wipe user data on upgrade (e.g. see 1 above). Aside from USB, this problem can benefit from system level work (e.g. XS - XO or XO - XO updating). BTW - 75% of deployed Xos are on 656 and 25% (Peru) are on 703. That will change as new countries come online. See: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User_talk:Gregorio#Shipment_Quantities_and_Languages I will be adding build #s to that data as soon as I can. 3 - File sharing I completely agree! 4 - Activity modification I want to hear more demand from the users, but its clearly part of our core mission. We need scoping to prioritize this re: 9.1.0 5 - Bitfrost Not sure about the long term design but it sounds like we need to fix that one hole ASAP. If we could be as secure as Linux + Gnome that would be a good start. 6 - Power Should be much better in 8.2.0. I'd like to see a design proposal and scoping for your additional suggestions. That should include real use cases (e.g. XO only chirping on wireless, XO not networking and user away for long time, XO not networking and user away for short time, etc.). BTW lots of architectural challenges were raised on the list lately. Its a great discussion but I hope it doesn't distract too much from the focus of improving stability in 8.2.0. We're in the home stretch on that and we need it working in the field ASAP. I hope we can manage two subjects in parallel: - deliver highest possible quality in 8.2.0 - design/discuss 9.1.0 Thanks for your comments and significant contribution to the project! Thanks, Greg S Date: Thu, 24 Jul 2008 14:25:37 -0400 From: Benjamin M. Schwartz [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [sugar] Congratulations! but Sugar sucks To: OLPC Developer's List [EMAIL PROTECTED], Sugar Mailing List sugar@lists.laptop.org Message-ID: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed (Foreword: I originally intended to send this e-mail after the release of 8.2.0, but I have been convinced to send it earlier in order to prompt discussion) Dear OLPC developers, Congratulations on your work so far towards 8.2.0, with its new UI, new underpinnings, and thousands of individual improvements. It took years of effort to get this far, and a tremendous amount has been done to reinvent the entire notion of a software stack to better serve the educational needs of children. This release will be a triumph. Unfortunately, it is also an abysmal failure. There is hardly a worse operating environment available than Sugar as it currently stands. In addition to an amazing variety of terrible bugs, this failure is due to a handful of major missing features. I list here six major missing features, and what can be done about them to ensure a 9.1.0 that moves Sugar from mediocre to outstanding. 1. The datastore Sugar's design calls for a centralized rich data storage system, the datastore. The datastore provides secure, limited file access to Activities, manages file metadata, maintains a differentially compressed history of all work, ensures reliable backups to a trusted server, and mediates the connection to removable media. Every one of these features is crucial to Sugar's functioning, and almost none are really working at this time. We cannot afford another release based on the present datastore, as it fails to implement the features we require, and is unreliable even in the features it supposedly implements. Solution: There have, at this point, been at least five distinct proposals for a next-generation datastore design, all differing in underlying implementation and user-facing
Re: [sugar] Performance
Hi Guys, I need short term options and longer terms options. What do we know already? Where are the bottle necks and how much work would it be to improve them? Stability is key and we're not going to sacrifice that for 8.2.0. Regardless we need scoping on performance improvement options and then we can pick an appropriate time frame and balance that against other priorities. Get me started with what we have already discovered, if anything. Thanks, Greg S Walter Bender wrote: +1 to Marc's comment as well, that was posted while I was writing mine. -walter On Thu, Jul 24, 2008 at 7:39 AM, Walter Bender [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I am steadfast in the opinion that stability and predictability are much more important goals for 8.2 than trying to make significant speed improvements. Also, do you know what build Miguel was basing his assessment on? -walter On Thu, Jul 24, 2008 at 6:16 AM, Greg Smith [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hi All, I just got word from a decision maker that they are very concerned about performance. They say that Sugar is slow. I'm probing to get more details but I want to evaluate the options in parallel. Focus is on improving this in 8.2.0. Here are the areas I can think of: - Activity launch time I know we had some threads on this but I don't know where we stand. Can I get an update and an evaluation of what it will take to greatly improve this? - File/activity open Can we improve this? A piece of the latency here may be due to a large Journal being much slower. Can we chunk journal reads or otherwise improve the speed of opening files? Can we speed up journal access in its own GUI too? - File save What is the bottle neck on save? Let's create a test case for this. - Task switching I've seen some threads on this. Can someone summarize it and give me a hard number to show how we have improved? - Activity or main GUI responsiveness to cursor It seems to me that the activities are a little slow. e.g. when I try to draw a line in paint, it takes a little while (maybe 100s of ms but noticeable) for the line to show on the screen. Similar with cursor placement in write or in the journal/home. Has anyone else noticed that? Is that due to CPU cycles or screen refresh or something else? - Hardware Can anyone evaluate how much faster it would be with twice the RAM? Is the NAND slowing us down? This may cost us significantly if we don't show improvement. Send me ideas. Any quick wins would be considered, even if they have a downside in another metric. I'll come back with more details on their specific concerns as soon as I get it. BTW this was raised by the kids in their blog several months ago. See the first link here: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/9.1.0#Unadorned_and_unedited_user_feedback Thanks, Greg S ___ Sugar mailing list Sugar@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar ___ Sugar mailing list Sugar@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar
Re: [sugar] Performance
Hi Tomeu, Thanks for the info. No change in plan right now. I'm just looking for background info and ideas. Please forge ahead as already planned for now. Thanks, Greg S Tomeu Vizoso wrote: On Thu, Jul 24, 2008 at 12:16 PM, Greg Smith [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I'll come back with more details on their specific concerns as soon as I get it. The good news is that so little work has gone into this area that improving is easy. The bad news is that we currently have nobody to work on that :/ If we are serious about improving performance, I suggest to make a list of the perceived performance problems, then try to come up with measurements that match as well as possible. In some cases will be easier, in some cases will be harder. Only then we can start to discuss how to improve it. Also, we'll need to be ready to do one of these: - move some new features from 8.2.0 to 9.1.0, - move the 8.2.0 release later (perhaps merging with 9.1.0?), - lower our general quality standards. Regards, Tomeu ___ Sugar mailing list Sugar@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar
Re: [sugar] RTL blocker for 8.2.0?
Hi Guys, RTL is a blocker and it should be all RTL issues unless we can show that they are cosmetic or there is an acceptable work around. The reason they are show stoppers is that we have major Arabic deployments planned for this fall and winter (northern hemisphere). I believe these are regression bugs in that RTL works correctly (better?) in previous releases. Some of the deployments will start before 8.2.0 is out but we need an upgrade path for them ASAP per NAND Full bug. Some of the ones that are planned for later in the year will go to places where it will be extremely hard to upgrade them. In short I do want these all marked blockers, especially if they are regressions. I'm not sure what milestone you think we will miss, but I'm inclined to hold the release to fix these if its not too long a delay. What do we need to do to get some people with knowledge of bidi scripts to help? I have asked all deployments to come up with contacts and I'll keep on them to rally the bidi community if I can find it. By all means, send out the call wherever you can find an audience! Thanks, Greg S Marco Pesenti Gritti wrote: On Thu, Jul 24, 2008 at 6:32 PM, Tomeu Vizoso [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Thu, Jul 24, 2008 at 6:29 PM, Marco Pesenti Gritti [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hello Greg, you marked one the RTL tickets as a blocker. Is RTL support in general considered a release blocker? If so, probably most or all of the tickets on the RTL tracker bug should be marked as such (and there might very well be more). http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/6808 Also, I think we should get ASAP some people with knowledge of the bidi scripts we care about to revise the whole UI. If we wait more, we risk having to do invasive changes too late in the cycle. To be honest, it's already pretty late :) Marco ___ Sugar mailing list Sugar@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar
[sugar] Filling the Journal
Hi All, I've come to appreciate that the journal behavior can be variable depending on how many items it has. Aside from the NAND full crash, I think it works slow or not at all in older release (e.g. 656) if many items are in the journal. The test team could use an automated method to fill the journal in order to test this better. Can someone write a script or help automate that test case? Let me know if that is not clear or you have any questions. I think this is a high priority to automate since we wont even catch this condition on short-run beta or early field trial tests. It would be super helpful if someone who's name is not Marco, Tomeu or Simon can do this... Thanks, Greg S ___ Sugar mailing list Sugar@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar
[sugar] Hiring for Sugar
Hi All, We have a posted job opening for a Sugar UI coder: http://laptop.org/en/jobs.shtml#User%20Interface%20Developer%20for%20Sugar We prefer someone in Cambridge. MA, USA but if you are a superstar pygtk coder, remote may work too. Please spread the word and get us some top notch resumes ASAP. Submit per link above. Thanks, Greg S ___ Sugar mailing list Sugar@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar
Re: [sugar] 8.2.0 Release Notes
Hi Walter and Gary, Thanks a lot! I got the frame and home views added now. I think the main thing I am still missing is a picture and explanation of changes to the journal. Anything else appreciated. These notes are starting to get more exposure now so please review and edit for errors too. Thanks, Greg S Walter Bender wrote: It seems what you are missing is the new Frame interactions. I think this page is relatively complete (although it doesn't walk through the invitation/sharing process explicitly). http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/User:Walter/sandbox/Frame -walter On Thu, Jul 17, 2008 at 9:33 AM, Greg Smith [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hi All, I need the latest, final, definitive screen shots and documentation on new Sugar GUI planned for 8.2.0 in the release notes ASAP. I plan to send release notes to deployment leads to see if they are interested in using 8.2.0. I will say that the release notes are subject to change but it should be as correct as possible. I especially want to remove incorrect info and ideas that didn't make the release. See the GUI section of the release notes at: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Release_Notes/8.2.0#GUI_and_Usability_Improvements I believe the control panel section is correct except for the Software Updates section. Please confirm. Scott, can you write a brief blurb on software updates? I need a link to additional approved documentation on the control panel. If we don't have one, this release notes will be all you get! The big gap is Home View and Frame Redesign Who can give me final screen shots and blurbs on all the elements in that? I posted the links I have but they may include features which will not make the release. I want to send pre-release Release Notes out at the beginning of next week so please respond ASAP. Let me know if you have any questions. I'll do whatever leg work is needed if I know who/where I can get verified information. Thanks, Greg S ___ Sugar mailing list Sugar@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar ___ Sugar mailing list Sugar@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar
[sugar] Bug Triage
Hi All, Its crunch time for 8.2.0! We need triage the bug list down to must fix items and focus on those. We're on for another bug triage on IRC (Freenode.net channel #sugar-meeting) Monday 9AM US ET. We will walk through the bug lists linked from here: http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/ReleaseTeam/Roadmap#Tickets I think we start up after id 5459. The goal is to sort the Trac priority field in to - must fix (blocker) - should fix (high) - nice to have (less than high). and to assign or otherwise update Trac as needed. Priorities at this stage are: 1 - Stability, stability, stability! No crashes, no freezes, no dead ends. No user input to the GUI should bring the XO down. 2 - No regressions Works as well or better than the last release 3 - Core functionality in place and works as user expects This is fuzzier without a manual but we may have a common understanding. e.g. if you can't insert an image in to Write reliably that would be missing core functionality. Nail the first two priorities and we can debate this one as needed. Anyone is welcome but we need to move fast. Keep design discussion to a minimum, focus on how it affects users, swag-level scoping, doc/no doc, and who should work on it. Have a great weekend see you online Monday. Thanks, Greg S ___ Sugar mailing list Sugar@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar
[sugar] Design Question
Hi All, Can I get a quick +1/-1 on this question related to http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/7331 The new Home View in 8.2.0 will have three available styles. We need to pick one to default on first upgrade or install. Choices are: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Image:Home_Freeform_View8.2.png http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Image:Home_Ring_View8.2.png http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Image:Home_List_View8.2.png from: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Release_Notes/8.2.0 Vote for your favorite as default first exposure to OX and let's see if we are close to consensus... Votes from teachers and kids count double :-) Thanks, Greg S ___ Sugar mailing list Sugar@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar
[sugar] 8.2.0 Release Notes
Hi All, I need the latest, final, definitive screen shots and documentation on new Sugar GUI planned for 8.2.0 in the release notes ASAP. I plan to send release notes to deployment leads to see if they are interested in using 8.2.0. I will say that the release notes are subject to change but it should be as correct as possible. I especially want to remove incorrect info and ideas that didn't make the release. See the GUI section of the release notes at: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Release_Notes/8.2.0#GUI_and_Usability_Improvements I believe the control panel section is correct except for the Software Updates section. Please confirm. Scott, can you write a brief blurb on software updates? I need a link to additional approved documentation on the control panel. If we don't have one, this release notes will be all you get! The big gap is Home View and Frame Redesign Who can give me final screen shots and blurbs on all the elements in that? I posted the links I have but they may include features which will not make the release. I want to send pre-release Release Notes out at the beginning of next week so please respond ASAP. Let me know if you have any questions. I'll do whatever leg work is needed if I know who/where I can get verified information. Thanks, Greg S ___ Sugar mailing list Sugar@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar
Re: [sugar] 8.2.0 Release Notes
Hi Sayamindu, Thanks, I did not have that one! I find it best if you just create a section and write what you want the user to see. Then I'll edit or ask questions from there. I created a section: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Release_Notes/8.2.0#New_Language_Support I know you're busy. If you don't have time, I'll take the first pass. The primary target audience for this is the end user, teacher or sysadmin who will deploy the XO. I want to also include links to the more detailed technical documentation (e.g. bug IDs). However, the main focus is the person who is deciding if they want to upgrade or has just been upgraded and wants to know what's new or different. Thanks a lot for your help! Greg S Sayamindu Dasgupta wrote: HI Greg, Are you planning on adding some information on l10n support? It might be a good idea to mention something like For this release, Sugar and the core activities support NN languages (which means more than 80% of the UI is translated). The languages are blah http://library.gnome.org/misc/release-notes/2.22/#rni18 would be a good example Thanks, Sayamindu On Thu, Jul 17, 2008 at 7:03 PM, Greg Smith [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hi All, I need the latest, final, definitive screen shots and documentation on new Sugar GUI planned for 8.2.0 in the release notes ASAP. I plan to send release notes to deployment leads to see if they are interested in using 8.2.0. I will say that the release notes are subject to change but it should be as correct as possible. I especially want to remove incorrect info and ideas that didn't make the release. See the GUI section of the release notes at: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Release_Notes/8.2.0#GUI_and_Usability_Improvements I believe the control panel section is correct except for the Software Updates section. Please confirm. Scott, can you write a brief blurb on software updates? I need a link to additional approved documentation on the control panel. If we don't have one, this release notes will be all you get! The big gap is Home View and Frame Redesign Who can give me final screen shots and blurbs on all the elements in that? I posted the links I have but they may include features which will not make the release. I want to send pre-release Release Notes out at the beginning of next week so please respond ASAP. Let me know if you have any questions. I'll do whatever leg work is needed if I know who/where I can get verified information. Thanks, Greg S ___ Sugar mailing list Sugar@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar ___ Sugar mailing list Sugar@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar
Re: [sugar] Sugar adds favorite activities to ring (Eben Eliason)
Hi Guys, On upgrade from 656, 703, 708 or any release which has no favorites concept, I think we should start with all activities visible in all Home Views (AKA in favorites). Is that what we will get with 8.2.0? I agree with putting any new activity it in favorites on first install too. Thanks, Greg S ___ Sugar mailing list Sugar@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar
Re: [sugar] EduBlog Image upload issue
Hi Tarun, I'm not sure that option 2 will work. I'm not optimistic :-( Tomeu said he will try to look at this weekend. Hopefully he can comment or help direct you. We're in deep trouble here so I'm relaxing the no changes to XO position. Changes to any activity that are well bounded and don't break anything else are fine. I think file choose is broken in write and browse in 656 as far as I can tell. I will confirm with Mirela ASAP but until I hear otherwise the challenge is paste. The option 4 sounds promising but tough. Nonetheless, if you can solve this via server side only that would be a huge win. HTHs. Still top priority aside from getting the Server back online which I will handle with Tony. Thanks, Greg S Tarun Pondicherry wrote: Hi Greg, Once we nail that (hope winning plan is set by Friday!) I think Friday is a very optimistic date =/. In any case, I'm wondering how much of a change this can be. Initially, we were going to avoid any client side changes, so I am wondering what kind of changes to the xo code is off limits. Option 2 - Tarun implements file upload that picks up write documents without the journal Are you sure this would fix the issue? If the the file chooser is only broken in browse and not Write, then I think we are up against a bug inside one of Browse's libraries that does the actual file upload. If the issue is the ObjectChooser class in sugar.graphics, then all file choosing (Write, Browse anything) should have an issue, right? In this case it may be possible to circumvent that class and get a workaround, once I figure out how things are structured. I can't reproduce the error on my 656, so more information on how/when/where it is breaking would be very helpful. Its very hard for me to guarantee feasibility on this issue, since I have little experience with sugar and am not 100% sure I understand the problem. Also, we have an option 4. FF3's editor will accept paste from xhtml with embedded images, and assuming the rendering engine in Browse is based on a fairly recent build of that, it should accept it too. We can relink the python code in Write to a new copy function (or add a new copy for blog option) and ensure the clipboard has data that FF3's editor will accept. One hitch I am unsure of is if ctrl+c, and ctrl+v actually do something more than use sugar's clipboard (ie use a native linux/gnome clipboard as well that firefox is getting the data from). I am suspicious because I can't paste with ctrl+v when I use the copy buttons in the toolbars. I'm unsure if its an issue with the type of data or something else. I'm hoping someone more knowledgeable than me can comment more on if this either of these options is possible and may fix the issue or could point me in the right direction. Thanks, Tarun ___ Sugar mailing list Sugar@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar
Re: [sugar] EduBlog Image upload issue (Tarun Pondicherry)
Hi All, Really sorry that I cross posted this EduBlog thread to sugar! That was an e-mail autocomplete error on my part :-( I need to slow down. Its not intended to be a sugar issue. Nevertheless let me know if you have any questions on it. I'll try to quash it back off the list ASAP. My apologies. Thanks, Greg S 1. Re: EduBlog Image upload issue (Tarun Pondicherry) ___ Sugar mailing list Sugar@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar
Re: [sugar] Activity versioning schema
+1 on Gary's comments! Hysterical and spot on. Please keep them coming and let me know if I can help you with your project participation. This is an important discussion about version numbers. The most important part will be coming to a working assumption (albeit temporary and subject to change) and communicating it. Who can gather the consensus and take responsibility for updating the wiki if needed? http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Activity_bundles Thanks, Greg S * [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [sugar] Activity versioning schema To: Martin Langhoff [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: OLPC Development [EMAIL PROTECTED], Eben Eliason [EMAIL PROTECTED], Sugar List [EMAIL PROTECTED] Message-ID: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Content-Type: text/plain; charset=WINDOWS-1252; format=flowed; delsp=yes On 16 Jul 2008, at 00:03, Martin Langhoff wrote: On Wed, Jul 16, 2008 at 10:51 AM, Gary C Martin [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Version (activity_version) is just some sortable entity to be agreed Please do read back on this - now lenghty - discussion. Unfortunately, any monotonically increasing version does _not_ work, thanks to the magic of maintenance releases. Let us bow collectively to the wisdom of distro maintainers who are smart and have been doing this job for far longer than us. In other words, let us do the same thing that rpm and dpkg do. It gives you both more expressive power, and a stupid 1.1.0.9z is older than 2.0-alpha cmp function for whenever you need it. OK, sorry, I've clearly accidentally wandered in to a room full of hardcore gun toting bit heads ? I'm now backing slowly towards the exit, my hands clearly raised. Please do be sure to post whatever (I'm sure excellent) final outcome is, clearly and somewhere public (perhaps http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Activity_bundles *** would be a start), so us external activity developers don't have to be part of this bit punk talk. *** Salient quotes: Each activity.info file must have a activity_version key. The version is a single positive integer. Larger versions are considered newer. The value assigned to this key should be considered opaque to the activity; the only requirement of the activity is that it must be larger for new activity builds. And: Each activity.info file must have a host_version key. The version is a single positive integer. This specifies the version of the Sugar environment which the activity is compatible with. (fixme: need to specify sugar versions somewhere. Obviously we start with 1.) if this is incorrect, please, PLEASE (!!) remove it from the f$# %ing bit rot wiki! --Gary ___ Sugar mailing list Sugar@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar
Re: [sugar] Activity versioning schema
Hi Michael, Thanks for the status. I wasn't asking if we have agreement. I was asking who will update the incorrect documentation when/if we have something new to say. You seem to know the state of affairs, can you update this wiki link http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Activity_bundles so it does not say anything which is incorrect per Gary's suggestion below? I'm trying to lay down some covering fire here so Gary makes it the door in one piece :-) Thanks, Greg S (perhaps http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Activity_bundles *** would be a start), so us external activity developers don't have to be part of this bit punk talk. *** Salient quotes: Each activity.info file must have a activity_version key. The version is a single positive integer. Larger versions are considered newer. The value assigned to this key should be considered opaque to the activity; the only requirement of the activity is that it must be larger for new activity builds. And: Each activity.info file must have a host_version key. The version is a single positive integer. This specifies the version of the Sugar environment which the activity is compatible with. (fixme: need to specify sugar versions somewhere. Obviously we start with 1.) if this is incorrect, please, PLEASE (!!) remove it from the f$# %ing bit rot wiki! Michael Stone wrote: On Wed, Jul 16, 2008 at 09:10:56AM -0400, Greg Smith wrote: Who can gather the consensus and take responsibility for updating the wiki if needed? No one can, yet, because there's a real argument going on between the people who have to live with the versioning scheme on the infrastructure and security side and the people who want to use it in the UI. In particular, there are non-trivial security issues with identifying activities internally with _anything_ spoofable - i.e. with any identifier that an activity can 'claim' without reference to some more primitive sense of identity (e.g. a cryptographic manifest). Consequently, as I have claimed on the several other occasions when this discussion has come up, we are _not_ going to decide on an activity naming and versioning scheme without having written down our use cases and checked that the proposed design satisfies them. What _should_ be happening in this thread is the collection of use cases. For a small selection of the issues involved, please refer to http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Mstone/Commentaries/Bundles_1 http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Mstone/Commentaries/Bundles_2 Regards, Michael ___ Sugar mailing list Sugar@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar
Re: [sugar] proposed addition to the Activities page templete
Hi Walter, Thanks for scraping that off the sur list. +1 on the entire idea from me. My only concern is to try and keep it to one definitive page. This is the one I am currently aware of. http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Activities Are you talking about updating that or something else? Thanks, Greg S *** Date: Wed, 16 Jul 2008 03:17:14 -0400 From: Walter Bender [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [sugar] proposed addition to the Activities page templete To: sugar List sugar@lists.laptop.org, Education [EMAIL PROTECTED] Message-ID: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 It obvious occurred to me after seeing some questions posed on the OLPC-Sur list: 4. There is an inventory of what activities can be used with mesh, nor what ways. 5. The mesh is only capable of some form of collaboration in small groups. Why don't we add a new field in the Activities page template that indicates both whether or not an activity supports some form of collaboration and, if so, what is the supported number of collaborators. (The latter may, of course, be somewhat fuzzy depending upon the nature of the connection: via school server or under a tree). We could have a simple set of options (the numbers perhaps need tuning): A) no collaboration B) pair-wise collaboration C) small (3-4) group collaboration D) classroom (10-20) collaboration We could break down collaboration a bit further: sharing interacting ??? and we may want to comment on, for example, how many Type A collaborations can be supported at once. An example of: A is Turtle Art B is Distance C is Write D is Chat We'd need to do some serious QA to figure this out, but I think it would go a long ways towards giving people a sense of what they can expect in terms of a robust use of Sugar. -walter ___ Sugar mailing list Sugar@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar
[sugar] Graphical Sugar Control Panel
Hi All, Can I get a link to any documentation on what the new Graphical Sugar Control panel will support in XO release 8.2.0? I tried searching the sugar wiki and OLPC wiki but didn't see it after 1/2 hour of trying :-( FYI I did find this on the current sugar control panel: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Sugar_Control_Panel we should plan to update that when the new release is out. I'm looking for a list of what can be set in it and any screen shots or other background on what it provides for end users. I can scrub through Trac bugs or technical documentation if that is all we have at this stage. I'm going to summarize what we have for the 8.2.0 release notes. If you have a long lived link which will be the official documentation I can include that too. Thanks, Greg S ___ Sugar mailing list Sugar@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar
Re: [sugar] Graphical Sugar Control Panel
Hi Chris, Good idea, will do. I'm trying to write the documentation about what it does for people who are trying to decide if they want to try this release (in release notes). So they wont have the release itself to try out and we'll need a written explanation of it at some point. I'll try it out and write up my notes ASAP to get you started. I'll out what I find in here: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Release_Notes/8.2.0#Graphical_Sugar_Control_Panel then link to Simon's page as well when its ready. Thanks, Greg S Chris Ball wrote: Hi Greg, I'm looking for a list of what can be set in it and any screen shots or other background on what it provides for end users. Have you considered running it? It's been in Joyride for a few weeks. That's no good if you want formal documentation, of course, but it would answer your questions about what's there. - Chris. ___ Sugar mailing list Sugar@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar
Re: [sugar] Sugar mtg reminder, 3rd July 2008 --- 17.00 UTC ---, irc.freenode.net, #sugar-meeting
Hi All, Very nice schedule and patch submission guidelines! Its great work and very helpful in showing how to create a transparent process that encourages people to participate. A few questions is the new Sugar GUI available in Spanish, how about other languages? Can you add a step in the process to explain when other languages will be available (BTW Sayamindu is working on translation process/steps for the XO overall and you should probably review that when its available). The reason I'm asking is that I want to track when I can share the new GUI with some key deployments. Thanks, Greg S Date: Thu, 03 Jul 2008 13:29:15 +0200 From: Simon Schampijer [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [sugar] Sugar mtg reminder, 3rd July 2008 --- 17.00 UTC --- irc.freenode.net, #sugar-meeting To: Sugar List [EMAIL PROTECTED] Message-ID: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Todays meeting will feature: Topics: What's left for the upcoming release: http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/ReleaseTeam/Roadmap#Schedule Changes in the review process: http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/DevelopmentTeam/CodeReview#Patch_submission Best, Simon ___ Sugar mailing list Sugar@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar
