I'm used to seeing five generations of old logs in
.sugar/default/logs. Now with 2523 I'm seeing eight.
mikus
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Was in a suburban neighborhood with three G1G1 XOs (767, Q2E19).
The location did not have wireless, though XO Neighborhood View
could often see two AP icons (locked, and not physically nearby).
Wanted to set up collaboration between the XOs. Arbitrarily decided
on Mesh 11 as unlikely to be
Under the topic Clarifying the zoom levels, Eben wrote:
... a way to branch out further and switch collaboration servers in a
way friendlier than the control panel.
A problem has already been described - that the existing Control
Panel takes over the screen, preventing the user from seeing /
I want to make sure we don't slow down the launch time without a very
good reason.
Well, how much risk and how much of Marco's, my, and Tomeu's time do you
think we should squander on supporting hacks to make activities launch
quickly?
Whether I am right about this or wrong, it seems to me
... This breaks existing i18n code. This means, activities which call
from gettext import gettext as _ will not be able to use translations.
Removing that import line would work fine though. Is that OK ?
When you talk about translating from gettext import gettext as _,
(a statement in a
Carlo : nowhere in the default GUI there is a clock, even if, in the control
panel there is a panel to configure it. I think that personal watches are
maybe not so easily owned by kids around the word, so a standard clock could
be a little, but welcomed feature. (not talking about the clock
Disclaimer: the following is a somewhat off-topic metacomment:
... I do not know what you mean by 'works best'. Most remote
annotation occurs offline and is never aggregated, but works just fine
for the production of notes for one's personal journal. We would be
better off if there were a
Then we should not have a shutdown button at all :)
Even though this comment was accompanied by a smiley, a software
shutdown button somewhere is useful.
I use a wired connection, and therefore don't use suspend:
suspend stops the wired connection, and resume does not
restart it correctly.
Morgan wrote:
Hopefully Rainbow will grow a mechanism for activities to request it
to launch other activities given certain restrictions.
++1
Please include discussion of such a mechanism in the 0.84/9.1/future
planning session that is coming up in mid-November.
mikus
Do we have any proposals of changes to Sugar so it better supports
learning in light of the reflections on narrative?
It seems to me that implementation of a Sugar batch language would
address 'providing a sequence (or graph) of events'. I see two
principal functions that need to be
Deniz Kural wrote:
This whole why would you need a USB in mongolia? conversation shows how
out of touch some people on this list are with the people the project is
trying to reach.
People live miles and miles away from one another (in Mongolia), and it is
entirely normal to travel to your
Deniz wrote:
... I also think, since this is a significant investment for many people,
referring to my original example of a teacher typing up a reading (from a
book let's say, or a handout) on a regular computer s/he already has back
home, and being able to transfer files back and forth on
Talking about copy-from-journal and copy-to-journal:
can you provide a pointer to these scripts?
Try 'which'. On my XO they're in /usr/bin.
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So, how about removing the list view and leaving that task to the
Journal? It's a much more logical place anyway, the list view is
basically a filtered view of the activity bundles in the Journal,
right? So if the Journal allowed a filter to just show activities we
would not need the list
Elana Langer wrote from Mongolia:
basically when teachers and students try to find their work (write,
record, etoys) in the journal it is hard for them to locate it -
especially if it is more than a few days old. This is why everyone is
desperate to save their projects on USB keys.
My
Christopher Sawtell, in responded to my post in this thread,
suggested that versioning would support Undo.
Now _that's_ a worthwhile goal to think about -- giving kids a
simple-to-use datastore undo/redo capability.
mikus
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I use Sugar as much on a non-XO as I do on an XO and so I often don't
have a dedicated key to access the Journal. I would need to resort to
opening the Frame and then clicking on the Journal icon--too many
steps. Speaking personally, having come from the wonderful world of
Emacs, I tend to be
It's important to me that the Journal be one click (yes, click; not
just keystroke) away when the child boots the laptop. The current
activity gets positioned here under the XO, so in the current paradigm
this happens implicitly. I suppose you could argue that the Journal
still gets shown
Also:
4. The zoom level metaphor is specifically meant to convey the idea of
physical spaces.
In the top 3, we're looking out at a plane with people spread across
it. In the bottom one (activity), we're zoomed in onto our desk, so
to speak, with a single activity taking over the entire
Fully qualified names (file names) are simple. They are misused to the
extent that users give things strange or confusing names. But, the
names are qualified and the users can encounter their work simply by
remembering most components of the name. The concept is
straightforward: given this
2) the Journal always appearing below the XO icon
If only. But only at first boot. The icon below the XO icon is always
whatever activity currently selected in the Activity View.
Except for a bug (which I've ticketed) - the icon of an Activity
which failed to launch still persists below the
I'm not comfortable with the value of supporting multiple versions
within the datastore. Why should the run-of-the-mill user need to
refer to obsolete versions of the information in the datastore ?
being able to inspect the intermediate states is important
for reflecting about the creation
Disclaimer: these are my personal opinions
A feeling I have had all along is that it is not easy for a user to
develop a sense of how to use my machine effectively. For
instance, the wiki seems to have so much information that the
visitor can get overwhelmed.
I've tried to help by putting
as you probably installed previously the Wikipedia activity, my guess
is that the jffs2 gc thread was taking most of the CPU.
If I understand correctly, this raises the possibility that other
actions performed *prior* to the launching of an Activity can
noticeably affect the time it takes to
Last night did a lot of activity launching (on 766). My overall
impression was that feedback by the system was way too slow. The
pulsing launch screen (which I like) was introduced to give
positive feedback to the person clicking on an activity's icon - but
the system was taking much too
Had WikipediaEn-3.xo on a removable storage device. Launched it by
clicking in the Journal view for that device. It took about a
MINUTE before the pulsing (i.e., activity is being launched)
screen was displayed. Otherwise the XO (766) just sat there (in an
unchanged Journal view - not even
Launched XaoS-2 (on 766). The activity is being launched screen
pulsed and pulsed for a couple of minutes. I had definitely
concluded that it would *never* launch, and that this was the Sugar
launch timeout that kept the screen pulsing -- when suddenly the
XaoS activity screen was drawn. It
Applications which I intend to use in the near future I keep
resident (Sugar Activities in /home/olpc/Activities, Linux
applications on my permanent SD card). Those I access rarely I
keep on a removable storage device.
Just now was using Journal to access Activity bundles kept on a
removable
Task switching by alt-tab seems pretty quick to me. Thinking about and
finding a different key to get Journal when you want it seems harder
than tabbing past it when you don't.
I agree about seems harder when one has to switch from using the
keyboard to using the pointer. But to me using the
Tried to install with 763. Something wrong with bundle.
Would someone please check this.
Thanks, mikus
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Good grief !
Do we have observations of how users (students) navigate? Are they
using the frame to do all navigation (e.g. by pressing the frame button
to reveal it or mousing to a corner)? Or are they alt+tabbing everywhere?
I'm not a kid. I wish that someone *would* observe students, and
I would like to propose Measure Activity to be included in the build.
++1
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One of the first things I did upon getting my G1G1 was to go into
one of the .py files and __NOOP__ the autoraising of the Frame.
That gave me Sugar screen behavior that was under *my* control.
Now, Sugar has again started to interfere with what I am doing --
by raising the Frame when I
The principal goal of this discussion is to make the X Activity
unnecessary by moving that functionality into Sugar's window management.
what percentage of legacy applications are multiwindow? If it is a small
percentage, then maybe we shouldn't be so focused on their support at
the expense
The current plan is to land a rewrite of the datastore early in the
release cycle, using the same API and the same user interface. That
will mostly help reliability and performance but it's also a
prerequisite for the new design and likely for any journal UI
improvement. It might or might not
In fact, there is a great deal of data from the field in the form of
the activity packs that Peru, Uruguay, et al. developed.
I'm not convinced that they are well-tested. They included News Reader,
which hasn't worked for the last several releases.
News Reader is a strange bird. In
Had a case of subdirectories mysteriously disappearing from
/home/olpc/Activities, including Terminal.activity. Then found that
some Sugar scripts would not run from the text console (ctl-alt-F2).
[It also told me you don't appear to have a connection.] Ended up
manually unzipping Terminal.xo
Lots of discussion -- but I'm not sure how much benefit the Sugar
*user* might receive.
I think that everybody agrees (myself included) that the user must
be able to call up the Frame anytime. And for typical Activities,
the amount of screen real estate they *themselves* obstruct (which
the
Was using the Control Panel (called up from the palette of the
central icon in Home View). Wanted to see which users were online,
so pressed the key to take me to Neighborhood View. But could see
very little of the Neighborhood View, since the XO was still showing
me the Control Panel as
mikus wrote:
What would a concise and accurate definition of the wireless lights
(for 8.2) be?
To ordinary users, they are 'Meaningless eye candy'.
They appear to not be 100% reliable if lit.
They certainly are meaningless when blinking.
They even appear to not be
For someone interested in human factors, this discussion has been
an eye-opener. My summary of the need: 'Users will depend on the
content of the preview image to identify which document entry to
launch from the Journal. My summary of the intent: Can Sugar
guarantee that what is recorded in
Isn't the Icon in the journal always the same for any given activity?
That's what the TITLE FIELD in the Activity is for -- to distinguish
(in the journal) between multiple uses of that same activity.
Admittedly, some kids may have a better visual memory than textual
skills. But the
1. Create [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list.
2. Create [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list.
Use the [EMAIL PROTECTED] list
I want to preface this by saying that I find the wiki.laptop.org
website more or less impenetrable -- but at least it has the Google
search engine that tells me where
Tried Map-1 in Joyride 2386. There is some sort of an
incompatibility within the map.activity code regarding rainbow --
the activity was looking in the wrong 'isolation' gecko directory
for its data.
Had to disable rainbow in order to launch map.
mikus
With Sugar releases being separate from OLPC releases, is there
an 'Official Platform' on which to validate that everything works?
[What led me to this question was that to me there appears to be an
Activity that depends on services not yet released in an OLPC build.
So what platform SHOULD
I surveyed authors/maintainers of activities hosted in dev.laptop.org
git over the past few weeks. The results are summarised at
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Morgs/Activities_survey
I wish that your list were more of a reference document. [For
instance, you have left off authors *you* know
Joyride 2368. The first thing after a boot, I clicked on an icon on
Home View. That Activity was missing a file, and ultimately failed
to launch. After the launch screen for that Activity stopped
pulsing, I was correctly returned to Home View. But the icon still
being shown right underneath
Scratch-6.xo is now at
http://dev.laptop.org/~cscott/bundles/Scratch-6.xo
I attempted to install Scratch-6.xo with 'sugar-install-bundle'.
Aside from LOTS of warning messages about invalid entries in
MANIFEST, the bundle install crashed with
Traceback (most recent call last):
File
2) To turn off mesh, click on wireless AP; to turn off wireless AP,
click on mesh (assuming no obstacles caused by bugs).
Yes. If by turn off you mean do not use, in particular.
But will the indicated communications mode persist, or will
Network Manager soon switch
Recently there has been extensive discussion of this on trac, on
sugar, and on devel. What I have gathered from that discussion:
1) To turn OFF both communication with the mesh and communication
with the AP, use the control panel.
But the control panel only has a checkbox for
Haven't tried your new activity launcher (I wait for the binary to
show up in Joyride), but your mentioning of the Frame reminded me:
I have no idea of how I got there, but I have experienced a
situation where there was a disconnect between the session that
was being launched, and its icon in
q2e12. Had a customization USB stick. OFW would not recognize
it. [Found out later that having a USB keyboard plugged in caused
this OFW behavior -- when I tried booting without anything external
plugged in except the customization USB stick, OFW recognized it.]
The system started out with
This might have a bearing on the jumpy cursor.
I use an external USB trackball, and do most of my work in Terminal.
On numerous occasions, when I have moved the cursor to a scrollbar
location above the slider, and have left-button clicked ONCE (to
scroll up one screen's worth) -- the XO has
Went to the location given by the wiki Activities page to download
Write-57.xo. [I've applied the bypass to rename 'keybindings.xml'
in that activity's directory.] Launched Write, entered ctrl-N.
That gave me real Abiword -- but the top-of-screen menu items
(plus all the drop-down palette
I'm not sure where this one goes, but I'd love to see the home views
activity icons and palettes represent the latest N journal entries for
said activities. I think this will be a great way to leverage the
Journal benefits by reducing new activity cruft, encouraging folks to
resume using the
Why not let accessing of *deferred* Activities be handled by Journal ?
Because it involves an extra step or two that in practice people don't
take. Personally, I would even go to the extreme that the Home View
should by default open the most recent Journal entry.
I'll be the first to admit
Just tried faster-2301. In the top bar of the Frame, the icons for
the currently active Activities were being shown in black-and-white.
Looked more aesthetic when they were shown in the user's colors.
mikus
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The easiest way to present logs, especially failure logs, is to make them
available through the standard Journal/Datastore interface. For example,
we have some agreement that when an Activity fails to launch, the failure
should appear as such in the Journal time-view, connected to an object
Recent Joyride. I typically have two Terminal sessions active -
I've given them different titles, so I can distinguish between the
types of work I do in each. I notice that when I call up the
Journal screen, often which session is displayed at the very top
will flip shortly after that screen
Patch (1) makes sugar registry
service not add bundles unless they're in ~/Activities.
I don't object to such a patch for 2008.
But I expect that sooner or later there will be hundreds of
Activities -- they will NOT all fit into ~/Activities. When that
happens, how to still have security
There is a practical problem with opening the software-updater the
first thing after a build install: What if the initial __settings__
in that build are not compatible with the environment required to
run the XO on which the install was performed?
For instance, I need to set some
http://dev.laptop.org/~rwh/Calculate-21.xo
That package is malformed - it lacks the 'activity' subdirectory
(including activity/activity.info).
mikus
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A question for Eben:
G1G1. I've seen a large number of establishments provide an AP on
channel 1. (Some on channel 6 - but rarely on channel 11.)
This may be an incorrect observation, but it seems to me that, to
date, my XO is slow to discriminate between a peer mesh existing
on channel 1,
See http://dev.laptop.org/~mdengler/6995/6995_screenshot_45.png
for an example of how I currently have it looking.
Thank you.
Currently, I use the presence of a 'Disconnect' entry in the palette
as a mnemonic device to indicate to me that a connection currently
exists. Would be nice to keep
First of all. I want to mention that when I first install a Joyride
build, the initial state of the 'inhibit' flags (i.e., filenames) in
/etc and /etc/ohm is not present -- that allows the XO to
'suspend'. Yet on the 'Power' sub-panel within the olpc 'Control
Panel', the 'Automatic power
I guess you see: http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/7486
Thank you. I manually applied that fix to Joyride as soon as I saw
that ticket -- but removed that fix from my list of things to do
when installing a new build when the fix showed up as being already
applied to Joyride builds.
I had
When in Home I click on the 'Control Panel' entry in the palette,
Sugar restarts. [G1G1, Faster manually updated to latest level.]
mikus
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Albert just filed a ticket saying that when there is an ethernet
connection, the user would expect *that* to be used (instead of
wireless). I agree.
mikus
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G1G1, Joyride 2241. In one Terminal session started mplayer -- it
was playing a movie. Went to another Terminal session, and entered
some commands. Noticed that not all of the text on that screen was
equally distinct - some of it was paler than others. Noticed that
*which* text was paler
It is the video chip's feature that it can display a video overlay over
the RGB bitmap. The pixels where the overlay can be seen is defined by a
colorkey (what was 0xFF00FF in the example), or the alpha component of
the display RGB bitmap (not used on the XO since the change 16 bit
bitmaps).
Eben wrote:
There has been lots of confusion about the difference between mesh and APs.
They're really not the same at all, apart from the fact that they both
depend on the radio. The new design no longer treats the mesh channels as
objects in the Neighborhood view. Instead, there will be
1. We're going to begin nominating this week's 'joyride-weekly' tomorrow at
0900 EDT. If you have risky changes you want to contribute, please provide
them
_after_ we deliver our nomination. If you want to help more peoples' changes
make the deadline, then please help smoke-test joyrides
A DECISION NEEDS TO BE MADE !!!
I've been randomly launching Activities on 2226. __Far too many__
of them fail -- because csound was changed, numeric was changed,
mixer was changed, etc., etc., etc.
Given that there *are* Activities out in the hands of users (both
with G1G1 and with
Please ensure that you have filed tickets for each and every one of them
What good will that do?
At the beginning of this year, I wrote a ticket saying an Activity
would not start. Without notifying me, someone re-assigned *me* as
the owner of that ticket -- presumably making it my
FYI - I am not writing a ticket at this time (until I can reproduce
consistent misbehavior). G1G1. Joyride manually updated to 2216.
My biggest confusion arises because I __cannot visually tell__ which
icon in the Frame top bar is associated with which running task.
I did not want
I'm not familiar with the details of the Rainbow implementation, but
I question this claim:
Sugar, as it currently stands, is among the least secure operating systems
ever, far less secure than any modern Linux or Windows OS. I can easily
write an Activity that, when run by the user,
[This does not fit the 'Subject:', but is still worth remarking.]
Walter wrote:
It is clear from even a casual review of the devel and sugar lists and trac
that much of the frustration experienced by both users and developers
resides not in the details of, for example, dbus or Python, but
I do most of my work with CLI from the Terminal.
On my XO with Joyride 2201 there is no bash history accessible in
Terminal -- hitting up-arrow at the prompt does NOT call up what had
been previously entered at the prompt. [bash history is
accessible from the text console (alt-ctl-F1).]
I get the same result on Joyride 2202 (manually upgraded to 2203).
What is happening is that in Terminal on my XO certain keypresses
(e.g., up-arrow, right-arrow, end) are not being recognized.
mikus
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The visual speed of operation of palette opening/closing on the
screen is noticeably slower on the OLPC than on a workstation. When
the OLPC user fails to slow down with his actions, unintended
consequences can result.
Was working (Joyride 2177) in Terminal with a removable storage
device.
Had not previously thought to run 'top' as the first command after
booting my G1G1 (Joyride 2169 equiv.; Q2E11). When I did, I found
to my surprise that 'jffs2_gcd_mtd0' was running at 100% CPU usage.
[That task went to idle after some 80 seconds.]
mikus
After I had installed the sugar 0.81.6-3 rpm on top of an earlier
Joyride, my 'Ring of Activities' in Home View expanded. Sugar had
added its base favorites to my .sugar/default/favorite-activities
file (which I had previously set up the way I liked it). Had to go
through and delete the
G1G1; Joyride 2172 equivalent; Q2E11. When I launch an activity by
clicking on the icon in the ring (Home view), I see the activity
starting screen (blank, with pulsing activity icon in the middle)
until the screen for the activity itself is drawn. When I launch an
activity by clicking on
Running recent Joyride on my G1G1. When I request a shutdown, it
sometimes proceeds hands off. But sometimes, after the Sugar
shell has closed - nothing further seems to happen. On those
occasions, sometimes the ending-picture (with the don't do this
icons) is presented if I press
The way I see it, there are TWO kinds of items for which
compatibility needs to be provided -- executables + data :
* Executables : The problem arises from the quickness with which
some users (such as I) can switch operating system versions. I
sometimes have two different streams on my
If, as is the current plan, multiple versions of
an activity can coexist on an XO, ...
Two use cases:
1. I have a journal object. I want to choose which activity to open it with.
I am presented with a multilevel menu: the top level has all activities
which open the mime type, the next level
Whatever else, when dealing with non-computer-literate persons, I
believe that EACH visual icon __must__ universally convey only a
__single__ meaning.
That is why I find the buttons in the Control Panel inconsistent.
Within the sub-functions, the 'X' button (labeled 'Cancel')
In Joyride 2146, when I 'stop' an Activity (by clicking on the
octagonal 'Stop' icon in the Activity screen's header), what gets
shown next on my screen is the last throbber page from whatever
Activity is now at the top of the Activity stack. My XO just sits
there at that nearly-blank blank
we have logic in the shell to limit launching activity of the same
type at the same time (i.e. before the first activity launch has been
completed). It seem to be that this is obsoleted by the new launch
feedback. Should we drop it?
My opinion - yes, you should.
But I've encountered a more
I often have builds (in /versions) on my XO from dissimilar streams
(e.g., Joyride vs. Update.1). Now that installation of Activities
is a separate process, I'm assuming that if an Activity in
/home/olpc/Activities works when one stream has been booted, then it
will work as well when the
Not 'Home View', but still:
Another problem is that the Activity button (the 4th zoom level) can
select the Journal if that was the last active activity. It has an own
button so I cannot see any reason why it has to be the way it is. It is
an annoyance that when I download several things then
A reference was made to Gears:
My point was exactly that it is a plugin.
There are other plugins that are educationally useful.
Security. I believe that 'Browse' is restricted as to how much it
is allowed to modify the operating system itself. Such restrictions
would apply to plugins as
[I don't have wireless at home; am using last week's Joyride.] Last
Sunday, I was using my OLPC at a cafe called Bouldin. Yesterday, I
visited a friend who lives in a wifi-rich location. At his house,
my Neighborhood view showed several circles which, when the cursor
was hovered over them,
Running Joyride, manually updated to 2056 level. Happened to look
at .sugar/default/favorite_activities. Found many duplicates.
Most duplicate entries were for the same Activity, but at different
versions. However, some of the duplicate entries were for the same
Activity at the same
Was playing around with the latest Journal. It (and various other
Activities) displays the 'text cursor' as a thin vertical line --
hard for my aging eyes to notice.
Accidentally clicked on the label of an entry -- that transformed
that label field into an entry field. But VISUALLY, there
In the OLPC wiki, the HIG:Journal talks about sorting. There has
been a ticket open for a year about adding sorting to the Journal.
When referring to things for which when is no longer remembered,
being able to *sort* Journal entries (e.g., by name) can help.
mikus
A fellow-user suggested the following hack to differentiate in the
Journal view between files 'foobar.txt' and 'foobar.pdf' (e.g., when
those files were put onto a USB stick by a non-OLPC system):
Rename 'foobar.txt' to 'foobar.txt.txt', and 'foobar.pdf' to
'foobar.pdf.pdf'. Then Journal (in
do we have any feedback regarding frame activation and the new control
panel option?
As much as I hate the mouse activation, I still think this is a
sensible default. On the XO we have a Frame key, but on other hw
discovering the frame could be a lot harder.
From using Joyride 2024, the new
The new Sucrose[1] 0.81.1 Development Release is out!
I was enthusiastic about the OLPC. It offered to improve the lives
of the economically disadvantaged through technology (i.e., by
affordably providing computational assistance). Sugar was part of
that offer -- a new look at how persons
Now have the 'Circle of Activities'. But Journal does not start
automatically. [Did not have Journal on Joyride 1970, either.]
What are the steps to start Journal manually ?
Thanks, mikus
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