Bill Bogstad wrote: > This note is only tangentially a response to Peter Robinson's... > > Here's my thought process... > > Computer technology can improve education for children. > > Collaboration (i.e. Sugar) and free software (i.e. Linux) is the best > way to make this happen. > > The question is how do we get educators/schools to start using (or > switch to) Sugar/Linux for children's educational computing. > > We can go down a route similar to OLPC. Tell them to buy new hardware > (XOs), buy new server hardware (to run XS), reconfigure their networks > (Xs controls all network access). (i.e. Convince people at the top > of the organizations) > > Or we can put together software systems which disturb pre-existing > technology as little as possible. Require as few new hardware > purchases as possible. Not require schools to make either/or > decisions. Instead let them use old AND new. > This is probably a 'developed world' point of view. The original > goal of OLPC was to bring technology to places/children > who have no access at all. They did this through better/cheaper > hardware. Sugar, however, is inherently software. There is > nothing SugarLabs can do other then to try to support the widest range > of hardware possible. However, widespread use in the developed world > on old/cheap hardware isn't a bad thing. More real world usage will > (hopefully) result in more contributors and make it a better system > for all users. > > As a result, I think the second approach is fundamental to getting > Sugar used and therefore improving education. I also believe that > SoaS is fundamental to supporting old AND new environments and > therefore is fundamental to changing children's education. > Personally, I don't care what Linux distribution it is based on. (My > personal desktop is Ubuntu, but I'm fine with SoaS being based on > Fedora.) > > I also don't think we can leave Sugar LiveUSB to any distribution. > My impression is that both LiveCD and LiveUSB Linux distributions are > essentially gimmicks for all of them.
I generally agree with the rest of your sentiments in this mail, but as the now quasi-official 'Godfather of Fedora LiveCD' I have to respond to this 'gimmick' claim. It should be noted that historically the linux LiveCD (and the alternate more usable but less compatable LiveUSB form) solved this problem for linux distributions, and still solves it to this day- Linux support for a wide variety of hardware is excellent, but on average lags by months and years, and even widely varies from distribution to distribution based on a bazaar of differing priorities. People used to sit down with several redhat install CDs, spend a long time, feeding CDs, possibly fighting partitioning nightmares, only to end up with a linux install that didn't (yet) support some favorite piece of hardware. Then, reading forums, the user might try again with a different distro, and just repeat until either giving up in frustration, or finding an acceptable result after hours or days of futzing. LiveCDs gloriously solved this problem. Users could completely non destructively try out the entire OS, albeit quite slow (or not so slow with LiveUSB), and trivially discover whether or not this particular release of this particular distro was suitable enough to justify installing permanently. Then the LiveOS installer came into play, which made things even much more convenient. Then my rebootless LiveOS installer came into play, which still hasn't caught any great press or reviews, but I still think will when enough people try it. But that is entirely beside the point of this historic background discussion. I also implemented LiveUSB persistence for Fedora, which apparently quite a few people actually use, even though I'll be the first to agree with your below words, that it is probably not, and may never be a solution for millions of users, _in and of itself, without installation_. To me, I view LiveUSB, with or without persistence, as primarily an _installation medium_. It is something you can carry on your keychain, walk up to a random PC configuration, use to test compatability, and then at your option, permanently install to the local system disk, or an external usb (rotating) disk, or even an external usb flash disk. Though as mentioned in a prior mail, I don't have enough personal experience with the installed to flash case. I hear anecdotes that it doesn't work too well with old crappy flash, and that features of btrfs in the pipeline should make it work much better in the future. I'm sure there are plenty of experts here trailblazing that particular bleeding edge, and I look forward to benefiting from their work in the future. In summary - LiveUSB == primarily trial and installation medium. I.e. perhaps the thing that _generates_ 'installed-normal-nonlive-fedora-on-a-stick' on sticks whose flash is performancewise on par or better than a usb rotating disk. $0.02... -dmc Does anybody other then SoaS > use (or hope to use) Live environments for regular operations for > thousands if not millions of users? Given the above, I conclude that > SoaS really needs to be something that SugarLabs supports. That > doesn't mean that Sugar should be tied to SoaS, just that it really is > a fundamental > part of changing education. > > Bill Bogstad > _______________________________________________ > Sugar-devel mailing list > Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org > http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel _______________________________________________ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel