Posts Tagged ‘SoaS’

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The sticks are here!

Thursday, March 4th, 2010

sticks3

Yesterday was a great day for the Planetarium Deployment in Berlin, Germany. We gave out a USB key containing the Sugar on a Stick (Soas) version Strawberry to every learner in our class!

This is a big milestone in this deployment. The learners have now the possibility to use the Sugar learning platform at home. This will allow them to dig deeper, to discover at their own pace. I am very excited how much this will change the way the learners will use Sugar. I will definitely let you know how we progress!

To make this all happen some work had to be done beforehand. Of course I needed to find some sticks. As not every kid had a stick they could use themselves I looked for a partner to help to the little data storage devices. OLPC Deutschland kindly offered to donate the sticks for the deployment - thanks very much!

Once I had the sticks there was the question which Soas/Sugar version I should put on them. Myself I had used Soas-Strawberry for months now and was really happy with the performance and stability. And as I use Sugar 0.84 in my class too, I decided this was the way to go. I had to fix a few bugs that were introduced by updates (Etoys, Write) and together with Sebastian we worked out an easy way to localize the image. Thanks Sebastian for all your support in those last weeks. I also want to thank the Sugar Labs infrastructure team for providing me with the environment to build the images, and especially Sascha which helped me to setup my login on a, normally lazy, Sunday afternoon.

I want to thank as well all the translators that made the localized Sugar environment possible. This is a great strength of the Sugar platform and the Sugar community which is hard to beat.

Now the learners took the sticks home and the next exciting part is if they will manage to boot them. Unfortunately there are many things that can go wrong. Some machines can not boot from USB directly for example. That issue I have solved by providing the students with boot helper CDs. But even though they have the CD, on some machines you have to set the boot options in the BIOS first. And getting into the BIOS is different on every machine, and even if the device is set in the BIOS on certain machines you still have to hit a key on boot to select the USB device to boot from. And how do you give good instructions to a young learner to make settings in the BIOS? Of course I asked the students to do the setup with their parents, but still I am very excited what the outcome is. For how many will it boot directly? At least I have feedback from one student that it booted right away for him… :)

All in all, I think this is a success story, and I hope this encourages the community to keep on working towards their goals and others to make similar experiences to mine.

Tags: ,
Posted in Deployment, Sugar | 4 Comments »

Create your localized Soas-Strawberry

Tuesday, March 2nd, 2010

There were some changes to the Sugar on a Stick strawberry git repository last night. We moved the part that localizes your image (language, keyboard and time zone) to a separate kickstart file. That way we hope to make it clearer how you can create your localized images.

Here is an example for a german image:


diff --git a/soas-international.ks b/soas-international.ks
index 355b216..cb00ea2 100644
--- a/soas-international.ks
+++ b/soas-international.ks
@@ -1,3 +1,3 @@
-lang en_US.UTF-8
-keyboard us
-timezone US/Eastern
+lang de_DE.UTF-8
+keyboard de
+timezone Europe/Berlin

Btw, if you need to create a boot loader for your image you can use the script provided in the repository. Simply do:
/boot-helper-creator.sh [path to iso of which to create a boot helper] (You must use sudo or be root on most system to do that).

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Posted in Deployment, Sugar | 2 Comments »

Strawberry weekend - or what a Sugar developer is doing the weekend

Sunday, June 21st, 2009

We are getting very close to our final Sugar on a Stick image for the strawberry release. And I have been cooking marmalade for the first time all by myself last night. Want to try this at home? Here are the two receipts:

Sugar on a Stick release:
- 2 colleagues that work productively together and manage the efforts
- developers that are responsive and do changes the last minute if necessary
- testers that file good bug reports and follow up on them
-> communicate, communicate, communicate - that’s all

soas_strawberry_poster

Marmalade:
- 1KG strawberries
- 400gr jam sugar (high pectin content)
-> wash the fruits, chop them into pieces, stir it up, put into glasses - that’s all

strawberry

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Posted in Sugar | 3 Comments »

Customized Soas Images

Monday, June 1st, 2009

You want to do a customized Soas image? For example setting German as the default language and use the german keyboard layout as default? It has never been so easy!

Well, at least it is possible :p We are not yet as funky as the susestudio guys, but with a F11 installation and no fear of a text interface one can customize quite a bit already.

First you need to install the following packages.

yum install appliance-tools livecd-tools python-imgcreate

Then grab the latest soas sources from git.

git clone git://git.sugarlabs.org/soas/mainline.git soas

You can change the language and the keyboard layout in the soas-base.ks kickstart file right at the top. As well the timezone can be changed here.


lang en_US.UTF-8
keyboard de
timezone Europe/Berlin
...

Or if you want to use Salut (link local communication) for collaboration instead of a jabber server, you can just add an empty jabber server gconf key in the soas-sugar.ks kickstart file.

...
# disable the logout menu item in Sugar
...
# start without a jabber server
gconftool-2 --direct --config-source=xml:readwrite:/etc/gconf/gconf.xml.defaults -s -t string /desktop/sugar/collaboration/jabber_server "" > /dev/null

You can add and remove activities in sugar-base.ks and mark them as favorite or remove that preference. Once you are happy with your modifications you can use the build script to create your image.

sudo ./build

The image will be created in the images directory and you can flash it then onto a usb stick following the Soas instructions. For reference, I use the following at a first flash.

./livecd-iso-to-disk.sh --format --reset-mbr --overlay-size-mb 300 --home-size-mb 160 --unencrypted-home Soas2-200905311344.iso /dev/sdb

Enjoy! Thanks to Mr. Soas aka Sebastian Dziallas for all his guidance and tremendous efforts around the Soas project!

Tags: ,
Posted in Sugar | 2 Comments »

Boot helper CD

Sunday, May 31st, 2009

I was left on latest Soas without networking on one of my machines. No wired or wireless networking. There were some messages that the /lib/modules/2.6.29-0.258.2.3…/modules.dep could not be loaded and NetworkManager was not able to load any interfaces neither. The same stick did not have this issues on another machine. Funky…

After further investigations I found out that ‘uname -r’ returned an old kernel on the effected machine. But ‘rpm -q kernel’ did show the recent one. This seemed to be more and more getting strange. I investigated the uname command in coreutils where it does get it’s information from - but no real advancements here.

One difference was that I booted the non-working machine with a boot helper cd! And that one does contain this old kernel that shows up with uname. Aha! The boot helper was created some time ago so the kernel in the boot helper and the one in soas did not match. Quickly I created a new boot helper based on the current Soas image using the script in the soas git repository.


sh boot-helper-creator.sh Soas2-200905311344.iso

And voila - it booted fine - and networking was working again. I am still not sure why exactly the uname is messed up - but at least I have a trap and a working solution.

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Posted in Sugar | 4 Comments »

A Triaging day

Thursday, March 26th, 2009

Today Tomeu and myself started early in the morning to spot all the bugs currently in our data base that need to be fixed for 0.84.2 - due in one week. Our list is medium, I would say - but there are some interesting and some rather serious ones. So let’s concentrate this last week and make the release rock! Help is welcome of course. Patches should be submitted following these guidelines. We will review now carefully to not introduce regressions.

This afternoon we had another BugSquad meeting. Frederick and Tomeu, our well known crew did continue the efforts we started this morning and we managed to triage some ‘unconfirmed’ bugs as well.

Rasika from Sri Lanka joined today - he wants to help in testing and had some interesting remarks and questions. Testing happens each Wednesday - between 14.00-16.00 (UTC), the BugSquad meets each Thursday 14.00-16.00 (UTC). More info on the BugSquad can be found here and of course good to read our mission statement. We might do some more testing sprints in the upcoming days - watch the sugar-devel list and the sugar planet for announcements.

Another point that was brought up today was our smoke tests. You can use this as well for Soas of course. We should get a smoke test derived from the more general smoke test up as well. More info from Mel and others on this subject.

Regarding trac - we need to split Soas more clearly. The Soas component should have its own milestones, for example. And versions of course. One could just add some for Soas - Frederick said he would have a look if there are other options.

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Posted in Sugar | No Comments »

New Soas-1 Image containing Sucrose 0.84.0

Thursday, March 5th, 2009

We have another Soas-1 image (based on F10). It contains the latest Glucose and Fructose packages from the 0.84.0 release.

You can download the image at.

Give it a try and report bugs at. Please use the Soas component for issues related to the image - like booting, not correct keyboard detected and use the sugar and activity components to report bugs with the UI.

Thanks,
Your Soas Team

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Posted in Sugar | No Comments »

New Sugar on a Stick image available

Friday, February 27th, 2009

Weeeh!

A new Soas-1 is out. It contains all the bug fixes that made it into head in the last days. And you can use Wade Brainerd’s fabulous Typing Turtle to get you going in 10 finger typing - /me won already a Gold Medal.

Get it when it is still sticky!

News:

Sugar
- Don’t add_bundle on activity dir change when installed already #442
- Make mute sound code togglable
- Keyhandler: Map XF86Search to the journal search
- Keyhandler: Catch all exceptions (thanks to silbe)
- Give time for atexit to execute when closing the emulator #435
- Dont hardcode the maximum amount of entries to cache in the journal #72
- Add standard ‘Print’ shortcut to take a screenshot
- Use keyboard specific keys to set the volume #430
- Update to new DBus policy #307
- Fix palette appearance on right-click #403
- Switch to existing instance of an activity if it’s already running #410

Sugar-toolkit
- Process .py files in subdirectories ‘./setup genplot’ #391 (alsroot)
- Improve error handling of calls to XGrabKey #431
- Cleanup temp files at exit #435
- Let activities provide their own implementation of get_preview() #152
- Show/Hide the color palette correctly (#374)
- Support setting None as the secondary text #384
- Only display one line in the secondary text of a clipping palette #384
- Switch to existing instance of an activity if it’s already running #410
- Reveal the palette on right click on an activity icon #409

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Posted in Sugar | No Comments »

Improvise - or how we promoted SoaS at FOSDEM

Tuesday, February 10th, 2009

You can see the status of Sugar Labs in the small details. While the talks at FOSDEM were well prepared our booth presentation left some space for improvements. Thanks to Mel we had business cards the second day which is quite handy at conferences. The friendly Fedora folks gave us some space at their booth so we were able to promote Sugar on a Stick. As Fedora showed some XO’s running Sugar the connection to our concern could be made easily.

soas

We managed to put the SoaS image on the usb device of 12 people in a few hours - which is given our low-tech advertisement quite ok I think. As we have learned something in the last months and years than how to improvise - that we can do quite well by now I think. For the upcoming LinuxTag (24-27 June 2009) we will be prepared a lot better I am sure. Discussions started on the marketing mailing list how this will look like exactly.

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Posted in Sugar | No Comments »

Lucky day - or how i tried to travel to FOSDEM

Tuesday, February 10th, 2009

I guess everyone knows those days when everything goes wrong. Last Thursday - when I wanted to travel to FOSDEM was one of those.

I first thought about doing online check-in for my flight, I actually already logged in but for some reason I thought it was easier to do check-in at the airport. This was my first mistake. Arriving at the train station there was already the train standing at the platform and I tried to quickly get a ticket out of the ticket machine. The machine wasn’t accepting my money and the train left. Normally this is no big deal, since the public transportation system in Berlin is quite good. The next train was cancelled, due to a police operation.

Finally I was 5 minutes late at the airport. All my persuasion did not help to get on the plain - even so I did only have hand baggage. Damn, why didn’t I finish my online check-in?

Another 52 Euros and I had my ticket rebooked for the next day. I met a Belgian couple which faced the same fate. We agreed that a drink would be appropriate now. They wanted to deposit their baggage in a locker to not have to carry it around. The locker was a strange place, outside the airport next to a parking garage, accessible to everyone. We were hesitant to put the baggages there but in the end the laziness crow over. Seconds after closing the locker another guy arrived to get his items out of his locker. He plugged in his key, turned it, opened the lid - and guess what? The locker was empty as an Icelandic bank.

Want to hear how all this end? Stay tuned after this little advertisement:
New Sugar on a Stick out now - get it when it is still sticky!

Our new member in the club of the failed told us that he had left his bag in there for only 4 hours - and this was during the day. The poor guy left for getting some help and returned with a security inspector who was to my surprise quite calm. He inspected the locker, which did not show any damage. Then opened the locker right next to the one in question. And of course the bag was in there. So our friend locked the wrong locker and his belongings were in an open one! The inspector told us that this mistake was quite common. Good news for once!

After agreeing that leaving the bags was save we took the train to the city. The Belgian girl laughed at me why I bought a train ticket as they haven’t been controlled during all the days in Berlin and had a weekly ticket. A few stops later inspectors arrived to control our tickets. They both had their week tickets but they did not stamp it. As the inspectors gets paid by provision for each fare dodger they find they are hard to convince. The ticket got a date when it was bought and as the couple wanted to leave that day anyhow it was quite clear that they did not want to screw the Berlin alley. No luck - they were charged 40 Euros each and they already paid 33 for their week ticket.

What an exciting day! The only thing that helps here is a good meal. I took the couple out to the Voland where they did serve a Russian Buffet that day which was a quite good compensation for all that excitement.

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Posted in Momentini | No Comments »

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