Re: [sugar] Sugar\Windows won't ship
The video that Scott are saying are available at http://twiki.softwarelivre.org/bin/view/TV 2008/4/28 Carol Lerche [EMAIL PROTECTED]: I assume many people may already have seen this articlehttp://www.olpcnews.com/software/operating_system/aquatic_sugar_childrens_interface.htmland associated video, but those who have not definitely should. It greatly enhanced my appreciation of the design goals of sugar, and in my opinion should be featured on the officially maintained wiki pages about the sugar UI. On Mon, Apr 28, 2008 at 11:02 AM, C. Scott Ananian [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Incidentally, this whole topic of getting Sugar to play nicely with Linux was the *exact* topic of my talk at FISL this year. The slides can be downloaded from http://download.laptop.org/content/conf/20080417-fisl08/cscott/ ; I'm under impression that the actual video will be available at some point from http://fisl.softwarelivre.org/9.0/www/ but my Portuguese is not at a sufficient level for me to know if this has been done yet, and if not when it might be available. --scott -- ( http://cscott.net/ ) ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel -- Always do right, said Mark Twain. This will gratify some people and astonish the rest. ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel -- Nathalia Sautchuk Patrício http://nathaliapatricio.blogspot.com/ ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: [sugar] Sugar\Windows won't ship
I'll say that the impression that I have received as an outsider is that the people working on Sugar have not at all been interested in compatibility with normal linux software. It's more accurate to say that while they are somewhat interested in that as an abstract idea, they are much more interested in making their interface whizzier, which is fun, and in rewriting the most obviously braindead parts of the Journal/Datastore, which staves off programmer and end-user insanity. (I'm paraphrasing drastically, from having watched a bit of their goal-setting for the next release from afar.) If someone came along with clean patches to make Sugar work better with normal Linux/Unix software, I think they'd accept them. (Some patches to Gnome, KDE, and other window managers are also going to be needed, at least if Sugar apps want to show their current SVG icons; no other window manager supports drawing SVG icons.) If the community waited around til the two? three?-person Sugar team got around to implementing these features itself, they might have to wait til 2010 or so. Somebody who implemented Sugar in the early days clearly didn't understand the X11 networked graphics model -- or didn't mind breaking it for expediency -- but they only broke it in small ways, which are pretty easily patched up. The problems in the Journal and Datastore are much more fundamental, thus are getting more immediate attention. E.g. I diagnosed bug http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/5744 and 5719 in the initial OLPC G1G1 software release. It refused to play (or delete!) audio or video files from external drives until they had been copied into the local 1GB Flash memory -- even if that filled up the entire file system and then rendered the system unbootable. That has been patched, but just barely; the API still comes with terrible assumptions like of course the application will make a copy of every file it touches. I do not know who designed that API, but I don't think they should be permitted to graduate from junior high school. John ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: [sugar] Sugar\Windows won't ship
On Mon, Apr 28, 2008 at 7:39 AM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: in fact there was a post within the last week claiming that it would be a bad idea to make sugar able to use unmodified linux software becouse that would mean that the educational software and activities being written for sugar could then be used on any linux box without sugar and this would mean the death of sugar. a couple of us responded that if sugar requires that sort of lock-in it deserved to die, but I don't remember anyone speaking up to say that the developers of sugar or the software team at OLPC disagreed with the initial poster. The lists has been pretty busy in the last few weeks and if we spent time reading and answering every single post, it would not leave us any time to code. That's not the position of the team at all and Walter just told it clearly in this same thread. I'm not sure why you are trying to pretend otherwise. Marco ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: [sugar] Sugar\Windows won't ship
On Mon, Apr 28, 2008 at 9:59 AM, John Gilmore [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Somebody who implemented Sugar in the early days clearly didn't understand the X11 networked graphics model -- or didn't mind breaking it for expediency -- but they only broke it in small ways, which are pretty easily patched up. The fact that it's broken only in small ways is *not* accidental. We understood X11, but we also understood the non-standard UI design we had to implement. The current implementation is one of the possible tradeoffs to be able to express the new UI metaphors by reusing standard X11 semantics. As Walter said compatibility was not considered a very high priority at the time. One year of experience and UI design changes later, I'm confident that we can easily refactor the window management layer to fix the broken compatibility bits. To be really useful though, we will have to solve compatibility issues in rainbow, datastore and activities distribution (.xo). And those are much trickier. Marco ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: [sugar] Sugar\Windows won't ship
On Mon, Apr 28, 2008 at 4:25 PM, Jim Gettys [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Mon, 2008-04-28 at 10:06 -0400, Walter Bender wrote: I must have missed the post you refer to. It has never been the position of the core Sugar team--that I am aware of--to preclude the running of standard Linux apps. We even went so far as to hire a contractor to look at various ways to facilitate the running of standard X apps last summer---although that work was never completed or brought into the main branch. Matthew Allum thinks we're best off not trying to force-fit this into matchbox (the window manager we're currently using), having done the experiment last summer. He's not only the contractor, but also the original author of matchbox; so I think we should respect his opinion in this matter. We'll investigate alternative window managers, rather than flogging this horse, which is clearly dead for our purposes. Many of the modern ones honor full screen hints, and I've never seen Sugar's UI do much that isn't supported one way or the other by the ICCCM/EWMH's. It may take a bit of sugar work, but I'd be surprised it will be difficult. If someone would like to go ahead and try replacing matchbox with metacity, would be great ;) Thanks, Tomeu ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: [sugar] Sugar\Windows won't ship
On Mon, Apr 28, 2008 at 4:32 PM, Tomeu Vizoso [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: If someone would like to go ahead and try replacing matchbox with metacity, would be great ;) And I'd be happy to help out whoever attempts it both on the Sugar and on the wm/X side... :) Marco ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: [sugar] Sugar\Windows won't ship
Note I understand that metacity can be configured to use a dbus/gconf version, rather than bringing in the dread CORBA/bonobo dependencies we've worked so hard to avoid. So don't let ldd mislead you that it isn't worth a try; it is. So Metacity is clearly one of the contenders. This wasn't an option when Sugar was started, though with 20-20 hindsight, we probably should have used something other than matchbox from the beginning. - Jim On Mon, 2008-04-28 at 16:32 +0200, Tomeu Vizoso wrote: On Mon, Apr 28, 2008 at 4:25 PM, Jim Gettys [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Mon, 2008-04-28 at 10:06 -0400, Walter Bender wrote: I must have missed the post you refer to. It has never been the position of the core Sugar team--that I am aware of--to preclude the running of standard Linux apps. We even went so far as to hire a contractor to look at various ways to facilitate the running of standard X apps last summer---although that work was never completed or brought into the main branch. Matthew Allum thinks we're best off not trying to force-fit this into matchbox (the window manager we're currently using), having done the experiment last summer. He's not only the contractor, but also the original author of matchbox; so I think we should respect his opinion in this matter. We'll investigate alternative window managers, rather than flogging this horse, which is clearly dead for our purposes. Many of the modern ones honor full screen hints, and I've never seen Sugar's UI do much that isn't supported one way or the other by the ICCCM/EWMH's. It may take a bit of sugar work, but I'd be surprised it will be difficult. If someone would like to go ahead and try replacing matchbox with metacity, would be great ;) Thanks, Tomeu -- Jim Gettys One Laptop Per Child ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: [sugar] Sugar\Windows won't ship
On Mon, 2008-04-28 at 16:47 +0200, Marco Pesenti Gritti wrote: On Mon, Apr 28, 2008 at 4:32 PM, Tomeu Vizoso [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: If someone would like to go ahead and try replacing matchbox with metacity, would be great ;) And I'd be happy to help out whoever attempts it both on the Sugar and on the wm/X side... :) Note that this work (should be) the same, no matter what window manager we end up using. Window managers have been pretty interchangeable throughout X's history. That's what the ICCCM/EWMH's documents are all about. If there is something missing we need, we can/should/will work with the freedesktop mailing list to catch the oversights. I suspect we're using dbus in some places where we should just be using the normal ICCCM/EWMH conventions. - Jim -- Jim Gettys One Laptop Per Child ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: [sugar] Sugar\Windows won't ship
On Mon, Apr 28, 2008 at 4:55 PM, Jim Gettys [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I suspect we're using dbus in some places where we should just be using the normal ICCCM/EWMH conventions. Activities/applications can run fine without DBus right now. The main problem are a couple of non standard X properties. It should not be too difficult to stop requiring those. Marco ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: [sugar] Sugar\Windows won't ship
On Mon, Apr 28, 2008 at 4:55 PM, Jim Gettys [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Note that this work (should be) the same, no matter what window manager we end up using. Window managers have been pretty interchangeable throughout X's history. That's what the ICCCM/EWMH's documents are all about. If there is something missing we need, we can/should/will work with the freedesktop mailing list to catch the oversights. As far as I know the current Sugar implementation should run decently under any ICCCM/EWMH compliant window manager, with just a couple of modifications. The main shell glitch I know about is the way we implement the frame panels (we couldn't do it the right because of matchbox limitations), but that should be really easy to fix, matter of using the right hint. And then there is obviously the fact that activities should be fullscreen. One way to fix that would be just to use the fullscreen hint for activities. Marco ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: [sugar] Sugar\Windows won't ship
On Sat, 26 Apr 2008, Walter Bender wrote: Sugar/Linux could easily have compatibility with regular Linux stuff, but this has been denied despite strong demand. Albert, saying that this has been denied is overstated. Was it a priority in the beginning? No. Were some decisions made that make it more difficult? Yes. But are people working towards this goal? Yes. I'll say that the impression that I have received as an outsider is that the people working on Sugar have not at all been interested in compatibility with normal linux software. in fact there was a post within the last week claiming that it would be a bad idea to make sugar able to use unmodified linux software becouse that would mean that the educational software and activities being written for sugar could then be used on any linux box without sugar and this would mean the death of sugar. a couple of us responded that if sugar requires that sort of lock-in it deserved to die, but I don't remember anyone speaking up to say that the developers of sugar or the software team at OLPC disagreed with the initial poster. I know that in an ideal world you would not have to speak up to deny each and every crazy statement that's made, but at this point there is so much uncertinty about what the attitudes really are (not to mention the problem of knowing who actually speaks with authority on many of these things) the reality is that everything that's incorrect needs to be responded, if only so others don't start quoting it incorrectly. David Lang ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: [sugar] Sugar\Windows won't ship
On Sat, Apr 26, 2008 at 03:27:21PM -0400, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: As for Windows, the problem is that you can't scale large installations without going bankrupt with the annual fees that Microsoft charges.? This works out to about $100 per computer per year in many US schools, and is one of the reasons that Brazil moved to Linux. As I have posted before, I am not distressed by the inclusion of Windows on the XO laptop, perhaps in a dual-boot configuration or whatever. What would distress me is if Windows was not sold as an option. If laptops could only be purchased with Windows, raising the price by the Microsoft tax, that would be a cause for complaint. I don't think OLPC intends to go that way. Windows is about more choice, not less, right? ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: [sugar] Sugar\Windows won't ship
On Apr 26, 2008, at 4:55 PM, Albert Cahalan wrote: Microsoft will never cooperate with dual-boot. They haven't ever even bothered with false promises. Forget about it. Actually, this is the last epic battle I fought at OLPC. To my knowledge, it's a battle I won. -- Ivan Krstić [EMAIL PROTECTED] | http://radian.org ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: [sugar] Sugar\Windows won't ship
On Sat, Apr 26, 2008 at 3:14 PM, Ivan Krstić [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Apr 26, 2008, at 4:55 PM, Albert Cahalan wrote: Microsoft will never cooperate with dual-boot. They haven't ever even bothered with false promises. Forget about it. Actually, this is the last epic battle I fought at OLPC. To my knowledge, it's a battle I won. You've either said too much or too little. Please explain who said what to whom. The rest of us have no context for your statement. I do recall your earlier statement that the XO would not suffer Windows lock-in on your watch. http://radian.org/notebook/paradox-of-choice And Microsoft has made it quite clear that it has no interest in dual-boot. http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/0,100121,39292078,00.htm I have no idea where Nicholas gets the notion -- Ivan Krstić [EMAIL PROTECTED] | http://radian.org ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel -- Edward Cherlin End Poverty at a Profit by teaching children business http://www.EarthTreasury.org/ The best way to predict the future is to invent it.--Alan Kay ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: [sugar] Sugar\Windows won't ship
Ivan was not the only one fighting this battle, and I think he quite overstates his role... On Apr 26, 2008, at 7:33 PM, Ivan Krstić wrote: On Apr 26, 2008, at 7:20 PM, Edward Cherlin wrote: I do recall your earlier statement that the XO would not suffer Windows lock-in on your watch. While preventing direct lock-in was enough to keep me from screaming bloody murder, behind the scenes I kept agitating furiously for a solution that allowed actual dual-boot. Probably out of sheer annoyance and an overwhelming desire to just make me shut up already, everyone involved eventually conceded. Dual-boot became the plan of record at OLPC and MS, and actual technical work began on this approach before I left. -- Ivan Krstić [EMAIL PROTECTED] | http://radian.org ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: [sugar] Sugar\Windows won't ship
On Apr 26, 2008, at 7:36 PM, John Watlington wrote: Ivan was not the only one fighting this battle, and I think he quite overstates his role... Sorry, I didn't at all mean to imply I was the only one. I would have preferred to have had no role at all in it, actually, since that entire set of conversations was like a particularly tedious game of broken telephone, and it was never clear who was opposed to what, and for what reason. I'm just glad it's happening. -- Ivan Krstić [EMAIL PROTECTED] | http://radian.org ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
