Re: [IAEP] apt-get upgrade broke TOAST
Ubuntu has decided to demote AbiWord, a core component of sugar, to Universe. As a Ubuntu user you might like to comment on this at bug https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/503578 From this reply, maybe it's good to have all of Sugar in universe? We have a dedicate repo for Sugar in Trisquel, so there is no problem if it gets demoted upstream. At least in what concerns to TOAST. ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] The question of open source, by Rahul De, Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore
http://www.livemint.com/2009/10/29231117/The-question-of-open-source.html But the more important aspect of open source software is the fact that it is “free”. This freedom follows from the nature of the licence (called the GNU general public licence, or GPL) that open source software is typically distributed with... Open Source and Free Software are very different things: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.html ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] ASLO testing
If you have a minute please test: http://activities-testing.sugarlabs.org/en-US/sugar/ It's the first time I come into this page, and it looks very cool! I have two complains though: the color scheme looks nice, but the contrast level (mostly the light blue text) seems a little low to me: http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10-CSS-TECHS/#style-color-contrast But more important, some activity descriptions have no license info. Showing that every activity is free software is an important issue and should be enforced. This is a problem in the current ASLO site too. Other than those two things, I like it a lot :) pgpr9ecgPGpKs.pgp Description: PGP signature ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] thin clients
Then I have a thin client network using LTSP-KIWI Opensuse that does not work well. It is two servers and 72 thin clients. I have a mobile laptop lab of 24 PC that are R30 thinkpads. My question is I found this site and wondered if I can use Sugar as an application on my thin clients. You should be able to install Sugar on SuSe using this howto: http://en.opensuse.org/Sugar But if your LTSP server is not working well, or more important, you would like to use a fully free software environment, you can give Trisquel Edu a try. More info: http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Community/Distributions/Trisquel http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Trisquel_On_A_Sugar_Toast http://trisquel.info/en/wiki/configure-ltsp-server http://trisquel.info/en/trisquel-sugar ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [SoaS] A proposal from Trisquel (Was Re: [DP] Announcing the creation of a SoaS Decision Panel)
Rubén, Apple Intel Macs can indeed boot from USB drive with the bless command, see for example: http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/sugar-devel/2009-September/019920.html http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/iaep/2009-May/005882.html I didn't know, thank you. But as I see, you need to provide a bootx64.efi file, and the process doesn't look very straightforward. (damn apples) pgpFUiM8SCXyh.pgp Description: PGP signature ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] A proposal from Trisquel (Was Re: [SoaS] [DP] Announcing the creation of a SoaS Decision Panel)
1). Live CD boots and runs fine on a MacBook Pro (though has no wireless network, or camera support, and screen redraw was a little slow in some activities so I guess no or little use of gfx hardware acceleration). Trisquel is fully free, so we lack of several hardware drivers (no nvidia 3d support, several wifi cards do not work, etc). 2). Using the Live CD to install trisquel-sugar to a USB stick (my main test goal). WARNING DATA LOSS: Targeting a USB stick for the install process worked smoothly, but right at the very end I spotted it saying installing grub to hd0. This renders the primary internal hard disk on a Mac un-bootable. After much experimentation***, the only safe solution was a fresh re-patrition of the drive, and to perform a full restore from a back-up (thank goodness for Apple's Time Machine). But you should not create a usb installation that way! A proper usb-creator is bundled in the iso, you can launch it using the terminal (a graphical launcher is on the go). The usb-creator utility builds a persistent live-usb drive, which will also run much faster than the installed-to-usb-disk method, and with no risk. You can read more about it in the wiki entry: http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Trisquel_On_A_Sugar_Toast *** PRAM resets, Disk Utility volume recovery, re-setting start-up disk, blessing from command line, re-install of OS, couple of other 3rd party recovery tools [trim] I'm happy to see you managed to recover it :) 3). The resulting USB Stick failed to boot on a MacBook (but might work on other hardware, need to test). The apple bios cannot boot a usb drive, but you can use the live CD as a boot helper, you can read how to do that in the wiki entry too. (It will only work if you use the usb-creator to set up your stick). Thank you very much for your tests. ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Sugar Digest 2009-10-12
6. Rubén Rodríguez Pérez has released an updated [http://devel.trisquel.info/trisquel-sugar_3.0RC_i686.iso Sugar on Trisquel build] with Honey Activities installed. He also added a graphical usb-creator application. From now on, the path will be this one: http://devel.trisquel.info/sugar/trisquel-sugar_3.0-LATEST_i686.iso It is a symlink to the latest image, the current snapshots are in http://devel.trisquel.info/sugar/ More info: http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Trisquel_On_A_Sugar_Toast signature.asc Description: Esta parte del mensaje está firmada digitalmente ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] A proposal from Trisquel (Was Re: [SoaS] [DP] Announcing the creation of a SoaS Decision Panel)
I filed a request at http://trisquel.info/en/issues/please-include-bootolpcfth-ext2-bootable-parition with an example patch at http://www.martindengler.com/~martin/tmp/makedistro.patch - but I don't know the environment so it might be totally the wrong place for inclusion of olpc.fth. It is the right place, thank you! But I'm not sure if the olpc.fth file will work as is, the kernel is not /boot/vmlinuz but /boot/vmlinuz-$VERSION. You can reach it trough /vmlinuz, but it is a symlink located in a different partition. Another thing to do might be optimizing the disc schema for the XO. We are currently using this as default: -Ext3 /boot (min 128, max 256MB) -swap (min 256, max 300% ramsize) -Xfs / (min 3GB, max 10GB) -Xfs /home (min 600MB, no max) Maybe something like this would work better for that machine (especially if its ssd disk is affected by write amplification problems[1]): -Ext2 / (min 2GB, max 5GB) -swap (min 256, max 200% ramsize) -Ext2 /home (min 600MB, no max) 1- http://thunk.org/tytso/blog/2009/03/01/ssds-journaling-and-noatimerelatime/ ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] A proposal from Trisquel (Was Re: [SoaS] [DP] Announcing the creation of a SoaS Decision Panel)
I filed a request at http://trisquel.info/en/issues/please-include-bootolpcfth-ext2-bootable-parition with an example patch at http://www.martindengler.com/~martin/tmp/makedistro.patch - but I don't know the environment so it might be totally the wrong place for inclusion of olpc.fth. We have a new release including the patch, and also Sugar 0.86.1: http://devel.trisquel.info/trisquel-sugar_3.0RC_i686.iso (same url). signature.asc Description: Esta parte del mensaje está firmada digitalmente ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [SoaS] A proposal from Trisquel (Was Re: [DP] Announcing the creation of a SoaS Decision Panel)
Will you be working on an LTSP Sugar? LTSP has amazing benefits on cost of ownership when you view it on a per computer basis. Sugar is already working in our Trisquel edu based LTSP server. :) I'm hoping we eventually get an LTSP/USB solution that still lets the student take their environment with them out of the school, to after school and home. Because we need to look at not just the cost of computers but the benefits of giving students ownership of their work and the freedom to work on their projects beyond the hour a week their school might give them in the computer lab. We still need to polish some things, and the usb support was not tested in deep, but LTSP clients can already mount usb drives in the server, so it should be transparent for the user. I'll do some tests the next week. I think its feasible to create but I'm not sure if anyone is working on that solution yet. I know it may not be in your priority list but I thought I'd put the idea out there because you could view it as a freedom issue. The way thin clients are implemented in schools the student's work is controlled by the school. When they are not in the building and especially if they don't have good internet access they can't access their work or the code. If they move and leave the school they usually lose access to their work forever. I fully agree. And thin clients sure are in our priorities. There are also some issues with copyright that are not addressed enough, regarding the ownership of the works of the students. I don't know about the schools, but in a lot of universities the distribution rights of the student works are shared -or owned by the university-, which is a bad idea and can cause a lot of problems specially if the work is a program. I think the students should always keep the control of their work. signature.asc Description: Esta parte del mensaje está firmada digitalmente ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [SoaS] A proposal from Trisquel (Was Re: [DP] Announcing the creation of a SoaS Decision Panel)
El vie, 02-10-2009 a las 20:40 -0400, Caroline Meeks escribió: Thanks Ruben Great news! I think besides freedom the other word that comes to mind is Power. And a lot of it! To see a room with 25 old computers and monitors on all day and I think all night...that is a waste of Power. Replace those with a server and give the individual computers to kids who don't have one. Several kinds of power are mixed here. We are using small x86 based thin clients in our tests, and depending on the models you choose you can save up to 90% of the power, heat the room a lot less, and work in complete silence, as they are fanless. LTSP is also useful if you don't have the power to replace the old computers, as they will work nicely as thin clients even if they are 10 year old, if they are capable of booting via pxe. To give a child the ability to continue work on their creations, be they art, music, programing, writing etc., from any computer at mom's house, dad's house, grandma's, day care, the library, that is giving them Power. And giving them a live usb drive allows them to carry Sugar too! I'd be interested in knowing the legal ownership of elementary school work products. But even if they have a legal right to them they have no Power to exercise it. When kids move often even the test scores and report cards that adults consider important are not transfered to the new school. Who will advocate for giving a child their computer files off of the server? That is why I said it is not being addressed enough. It will be a bigger problem in the future, and some privacy issues are also involved. I'm sure FSF will advocate for this rights. Where are you from Ruben? Do you have large numbers of transient families in your area? Its a huge problem in urban areas of the US. I read that in a city in NJ a teacher on average only about half the kids in an elementary school class are in the same school at the end of the year. I'm in Spain. I'm not a teacher, but I think it is not a problem here. signature.asc Description: Esta parte del mensaje está firmada digitalmente ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] A proposal from Trisquel (Was Re: [SoaS] [DP] Announcing the creation of a SoaS Decision Panel)
El jue, 01-10-2009 a las 22:04 +0100, Martin Dengler escribió: On Thu, Oct 01, 2009 at 10:47:57PM +0200, Rubén Rodríguez Pérez wrote: You can find more info here: http://trisquel.info/en/trisquel-sugar Thanks for the info. Two questions: 1) May I ask why you are creating a Sugar spin? Trisquel was born as a university project, and it has a strong focus in education. We think schools are the main battlefront for free software. This is why we made the Trisquel Edu edition, including several sets of educational software running on GNOME, and tools for class management like iTALC or LTSP. Sugar is a wonderful addition to our educational suite, and it can make use of the tools we already have in the system. 2) How can we send patches? IIUC the latest Trisquel Sugar .ISO won't boot on an OFW machine like the XO-1 due to the lack of an olpc.fth. We didn't try it on a XO yet, but I will apply for one right now :) I need to read more about OFW, thanks for the links. One like SoaS uses[1] might be good to include, but - I'm sorry for the lack of searching skills - I couldn't find a place to submit a patch that includes a suitable olpc.fth. We use the issue tracker for that: http://trisquel.info/en/project/issues I've just added the Sugar component to it. We need to come up with a cool project name. What do you think about TOAST, for Trisquel On A Sugar Toast? :D Where is the code you use to generate the ISOs (I assume it's a lot more complex than the SoaS code[2] because I did manage to find the How Trisquel is made[3] page)? You can find it here: http://devel.trisquel.info/isobuilder/makedistro It is in fact a very simple script, most of the job is done in the Trisquel packages and metapackages. We are now rewriting the script using the live-helper tool from Debian, which should allow us to reduce it to a dozen lines or so. The How Trisquel is made describes how the distro was created, but now that it is done, it is a lot easier to maintain than how it looks. If you want a new, let's say, amd64 version of the Sugar iso, you just need to run makedistro all amd64 trisquel-sugar and wait for five minutes. We did almost no changes to our build scripts for this project, it works just with the tiny trisquel-sugar metapackage, some artwork, and the impressive repository Aleksey built for us. signature.asc Description: Esta parte del mensaje está firmada digitalmente ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Sugar Digest 2009-09-30
All of these distributions come with the core (Fructose) activities; some, such as openSUSE, come with many additional (Honey) activities pre-packaged. We've just added the Honey pack to Sugar on Trisquel, and also the graphical usb-creator app. The (430MB) iso url is the same: http://devel.trisquel.info/trisquel-sugar_3.0RC_i686.iso To start the usb-creator, launch a live session using the image (using a cd or with a virtual machine), start the terminal and run usb-creator. Some of the activities will probably fail, but it is a nice testing environment. We will set up a nightly builder ASAP. signature.asc Description: Esta parte del mensaje está firmada digitalmente ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
[IAEP] Sugar 0.86 on Trisquel 3.0, ready for testing
Thanks to the packages Aleksey made last week, we have been able to build a new Trisquel+Sugar iso, this one using the latest Sugar on top of the latest Trisquel, and also fixing the bugs from the first release. It works nicely on wired or wireless computers, the installer is now Sugar themed, the flash video support was improved with the latest gnash, and much more details. It worked pretty nice in our tests, so we are calling it a release candidate. Our build environment can generate the iso in one command -it takes roughly 5 minutes starting from scratch-, so we could easily compile weekly -or even nightly- builds if that helps Sugar developers. You can find the new image at: http://devel.trisquel.info/trisquel-sugar_3.0RC_i686.iso We have just published a more detailed article announcing the project to the public at http://trisquel.info/en/trisquel-sugar , including some screenshots and instructions for testers. signature.asc Description: Esta parte del mensaje está firmada digitalmente ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
[IAEP] Introducing myself and Trisquel+Sugar
Hello everyone, I'm Rubén Rodríguez, from Spain. I'm the main developer of Trisquel GNU/Linux, a fully free distro endorsed by the FSF. We are working on a Sugar powered live/installable system using Trisquel, which was briefly introduced during the FSF Software Freedom Day event. Many thanks to Aleksey Lim and all the other folks who are helping us with this. Our system is similar to SoaS, but not just intended for usb drives. It can be used in that way (even with persistent user data) but it can also be installed in a PC or be loaded via LTSP using diskless PC's or thin clients. We do not want to replace existing projects, but to provide a fully libre Sugar environment while improving our educational software. We are building this system on top of Trisquel Edu 2.2, which is our educational operating system based on Ubuntu LTS. It will be our recommended platform for big deployments, either using LTSP servers or standalone installations, as it is very stable and supported. As for the live usb soas-like functionality, we will develop a version using the latest Trisquel 3.0 core, which is based on the latest Ubuntu release. This way we would have even better hardware support and newer libraries. If you want to give our beta a try, you can find it at: http://devel.trisquel.info/trisquel-sugar_2.2.1-beta_i686.iso As it is still a work in progress, it must be tested in a computer wired to a router serving dhcp, or it will fail to load the user session. We will release a new beta based on Trisquel 3.0 in a few days. We hope you find our project interesting, as we are really looking forward to get involved in your wonderful community. Regards, Rubén PS: More info about Trisquel can be found at http://trisquel.info/en/ ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
