Re: [Sugar-devel] Children want Sugar 0.84, for the wrong reason
Bernie. Thanks so much for this. With the 5th grade US students I work with, this customization is really important to their sense of ownership. By the way, how do you upgrade the XOs (we have XO-1s) to .84? This is a very big deal for us. Thanks. Gerald On Sat, Mar 13, 2010 at 8:11 AM, Bernie Innocenti ber...@codewiz.orgwrote: On Sat, 2010-03-13 at 13:35 +0100, Bert Freudenberg wrote: So +1 to look customization. E.g., why not allow to change the gray frame color? In Etoys you can at least change the toolbar color (not permanently though, I should fix that). Even if it enrages our latte-drinking black-wearing designer friends ;) they're kids after all ... I feel that Sugar should aim to reach the same level of hackability of eToys: every UI element is an object that you could drag, drop, copy or modify. Of course, this has consequences in terms of stability and clarity. Before we could unleash this power we need to think of ways to recover from mistakes. If multiple undo is too hard, a restore everything to defaults might be good enough. Perhaps we're worrying too much. Re-installing the system from USB takes only 3 minutes and is already being done very often. A boy just showed up on the door of the repair lab, saying: se borró el Navegador (the Browse activity deleted itself :-) All we need to do is make the backup-update-restore procedure slightly more automated so that kids and teachers could do it without bothering the technicians. Actually, we don't even need to worry too much for a solid backup and restore procedure. I've always suspected that most kids wouldn't care about preserving their diary. Now it's confirmed: kids are flocking here to get the new version of Sugar even though their journals are not going to be preserved across the upgrade. On the other hand, teachers and teacher trainers always ask to preserve the content of their journal. Technicians use a pair of simple shell scripts to tar up the journal to a USB stick, so they don't depend on being within the range of the correct school server. I'll summarize all these things in a field report asap. -- // Bernie Innocenti - http://codewiz.org/ \X/ Sugar Labs - http://sugarlabs.org/ ___ Sugar-devel mailing list sugar-de...@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: [Sugar-devel] Children want Sugar 0.84, for the wrong reason
Bernie, Where can I download this image? Thanks. Gerald On Sat, Mar 13, 2010 at 8:49 AM, Bernie Innocenti ber...@codewiz.orgwrote: On Sat, 2010-03-13 at 08:33 -0500, Gerald Ardito wrote: By the way, how do you upgrade the XOs (we have XO-1s) to .84? This is a very big deal for us. We use a local variant of the F11-XO1 images by Stephen Parrish, signed with the deployment keys. The procedure for each laptop is: (1) backup the lease.sig to a USB stick (cp /security/lease.sig /media/PENDRIVE) (2) reboot while pressing all 4 game keys (3) wait for about 3 minutes to load the image (4) boot with the USB stick still fitted to re-activate the laptop If your laptops are unlocked, you can save steps (1) and (4) and you don't need a signed build. The procedure would become: (1) press ESC on boot to get to the ok prompt (2) type copy-nand u:\osNN.img (3) wait for about 3 minutes to load the image See my reply to Bert in this same thread for some considerations about Journal backup/restore. The scripts I mention in that post are available from our public repository, but atm I can't reach the office to retrieve the link. They're really crude scripts, no big deal. It would be really cool if someone could work on a bootable USB stick which would automatically perform full backups and restores. Not only it would save time, it would make students and teachers more autonomous from us techies. -- // Bernie Innocenti - http://codewiz.org/ \X/ Sugar Labs - http://sugarlabs.org/ ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: [Sugar-devel] Children want Sugar 0.84, for the wrong reason
On 13.03.2010, at 11:56, Bernie Innocenti wrote: I've spent three days in Caacupè, observing how the new F11-XO1 build is doing among our young user base. It's a great success, but for the wrong reason: http://codewiz.org/wiki/blog/2010/03#mon-mar-8--children-want-sugar-084-for-the-wrong-reasons Very valid observation. My kids change their desktop wallpaper about every week. So +1 to look customization. E.g., why not allow to change the gray frame color? In Etoys you can at least change the toolbar color (not permanently though, I should fix that). Even if it enrages our latte-drinking black-wearing designer friends ;) they're kids after all ... - Bert - ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: [Sugar-devel] Children want Sugar 0.84, for the wrong reason
On Sat, 2010-03-13 at 13:35 +0100, Bert Freudenberg wrote: So +1 to look customization. E.g., why not allow to change the gray frame color? In Etoys you can at least change the toolbar color (not permanently though, I should fix that). Even if it enrages our latte-drinking black-wearing designer friends ;) they're kids after all ... I feel that Sugar should aim to reach the same level of hackability of eToys: every UI element is an object that you could drag, drop, copy or modify. Of course, this has consequences in terms of stability and clarity. Before we could unleash this power we need to think of ways to recover from mistakes. If multiple undo is too hard, a restore everything to defaults might be good enough. Perhaps we're worrying too much. Re-installing the system from USB takes only 3 minutes and is already being done very often. A boy just showed up on the door of the repair lab, saying: se borró el Navegador (the Browse activity deleted itself :-) All we need to do is make the backup-update-restore procedure slightly more automated so that kids and teachers could do it without bothering the technicians. Actually, we don't even need to worry too much for a solid backup and restore procedure. I've always suspected that most kids wouldn't care about preserving their diary. Now it's confirmed: kids are flocking here to get the new version of Sugar even though their journals are not going to be preserved across the upgrade. On the other hand, teachers and teacher trainers always ask to preserve the content of their journal. Technicians use a pair of simple shell scripts to tar up the journal to a USB stick, so they don't depend on being within the range of the correct school server. I'll summarize all these things in a field report asap. -- // Bernie Innocenti - http://codewiz.org/ \X/ Sugar Labs - http://sugarlabs.org/ ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: [Sugar-devel] Children want Sugar 0.84, for the wrong reason
On Sat, 2010-03-13 at 08:33 -0500, Gerald Ardito wrote: By the way, how do you upgrade the XOs (we have XO-1s) to .84? This is a very big deal for us. We use a local variant of the F11-XO1 images by Stephen Parrish, signed with the deployment keys. The procedure for each laptop is: (1) backup the lease.sig to a USB stick (cp /security/lease.sig /media/PENDRIVE) (2) reboot while pressing all 4 game keys (3) wait for about 3 minutes to load the image (4) boot with the USB stick still fitted to re-activate the laptop If your laptops are unlocked, you can save steps (1) and (4) and you don't need a signed build. The procedure would become: (1) press ESC on boot to get to the ok prompt (2) type copy-nand u:\osNN.img (3) wait for about 3 minutes to load the image See my reply to Bert in this same thread for some considerations about Journal backup/restore. The scripts I mention in that post are available from our public repository, but atm I can't reach the office to retrieve the link. They're really crude scripts, no big deal. It would be really cool if someone could work on a bootable USB stick which would automatically perform full backups and restores. Not only it would save time, it would make students and teachers more autonomous from us techies. -- // Bernie Innocenti - http://codewiz.org/ \X/ Sugar Labs - http://sugarlabs.org/ ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: [Sugar-devel] Children want Sugar 0.84, for the wrong reason
See http://bugs.sugarlabs.org/ticket/535#comment:5, Expose Journal, Home, Group, Neighborhood, Frame Sources, where it's suggested that we extend the 'Show Source' facility to more of Sugar. Learners like to exercise and demonstrate their knowledge by customizing or changing their environments. We can guide them to learn deeper concepts by giving them ways to encode their customizations. (Providing a convenient undo, save, and restore facility for their work would accelerate their learning.) The 'Modifying Sugar' chapter in our manual, http://en.flossmanuals.net/Sugar/ModifyingSugar, provides a nice entry ramp for this learning activity. We could provide a similar tutorial for other Sugar features and then benefit from the creativity of all our learners. On Sat, Mar 13, 2010 at 8:11 AM, Bernie Innocenti ber...@codewiz.org wrote: On Sat, 2010-03-13 at 13:35 +0100, Bert Freudenberg wrote: So +1 to look customization. E.g., why not allow to change the gray frame color? In Etoys you can at least change the toolbar color (not permanently though, I should fix that). Even if it enrages our latte-drinking black-wearing designer friends ;) they're kids after all ... I feel that Sugar should aim to reach the same level of hackability of eToys: every UI element is an object that you could drag, drop, copy or modify. Of course, this has consequences in terms of stability and clarity. Before we could unleash this power we need to think of ways to recover from mistakes. If multiple undo is too hard, a restore everything to defaults might be good enough. Perhaps we're worrying too much. Re-installing the system from USB takes only 3 minutes and is already being done very often. A boy just showed up on the door of the repair lab, saying: se borró el Navegador (the Browse activity deleted itself :-) All we need to do is make the backup-update-restore procedure slightly more automated so that kids and teachers could do it without bothering the technicians. Actually, we don't even need to worry too much for a solid backup and restore procedure. I've always suspected that most kids wouldn't care about preserving their diary. Now it's confirmed: kids are flocking here to get the new version of Sugar even though their journals are not going to be preserved across the upgrade. On the other hand, teachers and teacher trainers always ask to preserve the content of their journal. Technicians use a pair of simple shell scripts to tar up the journal to a USB stick, so they don't depend on being within the range of the correct school server. I'll summarize all these things in a field report asap. -- // Bernie Innocenti - http://codewiz.org/ \X/ Sugar Labs - http://sugarlabs.org/ ___ Sugar-devel mailing list sugar-de...@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: [IAEP] [Sugar-devel] Children want Sugar 0.84, for the wrong reason
On Sat, Mar 13, 2010 at 8:49 AM, Bernie Innocenti ber...@codewiz.org wrote: On Sat, 2010-03-13 at 08:33 -0500, Gerald Ardito wrote: By the way, how do you upgrade the XOs (we have XO-1s) to .84? This is a very big deal for us. We use a local variant of the F11-XO1 images by Stephen Parrish, signed with the deployment keys. How well is that build working, from a let's use it in the field PoV? cheers, m -- martin.langh...@gmail.com mar...@laptop.org -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: [IAEP] [Sugar-devel] Children want Sugar 0.84, for the wrong reason
On Sat, 2010-03-13 at 10:46 -0500, Martin Langhoff wrote: On Sat, Mar 13, 2010 at 8:49 AM, Bernie Innocenti ber...@codewiz.org wrote: On Sat, 2010-03-13 at 08:33 -0500, Gerald Ardito wrote: By the way, how do you upgrade the XOs (we have XO-1s) to .84? This is a very big deal for us. We use a local variant of the F11-XO1 images by Stephen Parrish, signed with the deployment keys. How well is that build working, from a let's use it in the field PoV? Depends very much on who you ask to. Teacher / trainers: It deleted my stuff I can't learn it None of the new activities work We can't work any more with this new version This GNOME thing has many drawbacks GNOME prevents activities from working Children: Please install colored windows The new Sugar is faster How do I get to piecito? (little foot == GNOME) I like the screensaver ...many more... If you ask me: our recent F11-XO1 builds have reached equal or better quality than build 801, provided you disable automatic power management. Activities still need some bug-fixing, but nothing serious. I filed a bunch of bugs in the SL and OLPC trackers. I asked educators to send us clear and complete bug reports every time they see something odd, but all I've seen so far is distress calls, of course sent through private channels instead of the ones I suggested :-) I think this is all natural: non-technical adults tend to panic on the idea to replace something familiar with something that will force them to learn something new. This is the first time in their *lives* it happens, so we should be understanding. In less than 2 months, they'd be happy with this version and unable to use the old one. Hopefully, they will complain a little less on the next upgrade to 0.86 and 0.88... Until they finally get used to the idea that software tends to improve over time rather than getting worse. -- // Bernie Innocenti - http://codewiz.org/ \X/ Sugar Labs - http://sugarlabs.org/ ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: [IAEP] [Sugar-devel] Children want Sugar 0.84, for the wrong reason
On Sat, Mar 13, 2010 at 11:50 AM, Bernie Innocenti ber...@codewiz.org wrote: If you ask me: our recent F11-XO1 builds have reached equal or better quality than build 801, provided you disable automatic power management. Are all activities working, including collaboration? In Gnome, can you actually use FF? Camera? Hopefully, they will complain a little less on the next upgrade to 0.86 and 0.88... Until they finally get used to the idea that software tends to improve over time rather than getting worse. Or we slow down to a rhythm that they can cope with ;-)! m -- martin.langh...@gmail.com mar...@laptop.org -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: [IAEP] [Sugar-devel] Children want Sugar 0.84, for the wrong reason
Forgot to answer a paragraph: On Sat, 2010-03-13 at 12:07 -0500, Martin Langhoff wrote: On Sat, Mar 13, 2010 at 11:50 AM, Bernie Innocenti ber...@codewiz.org wrote: If you ask me: our recent F11-XO1 builds have reached equal or better quality than build 801, provided you disable automatic power management. Are all activities working, including collaboration? In Gnome, can you actually use FF? Camera? I've seen some users using Firefox, so it probably works well enough. I've noticed some annoying graphics artifacts on buttons, probably caused by a geode driver bug exposed by the gtk theme. I've been focusing exclusively on Sugar and core activities. Gnome is very popular among children, but I'm not particularly motivated in supporting it. Frankly, I also don't test Sugar beyond very basic functionality: networking, journal, browse... Not only I wouldn't have time to comprehensively test every activity, I also wouldn't do the same things that creative users actually do with them. Instead, I've invested on building a testing team form a small crowd of smart children who are using their laptops 6 hours a day. -- // Bernie Innocenti - http://codewiz.org/ \X/ Sugar Labs - http://sugarlabs.org/ ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
