Fedora

Day 32: Summer Holidays

Karl L OLPC, SUGAR , , , , ,

Well the time spent working on the project so far has flown by, and as previously organised I will now be taking some holiday leave until mid August, meaning I will probably be back working on the project some time after 2009.08.17.

This doesn’t mean the ball stops rolling however, and it allows me to hand the joint reigns over to Andy who will be living in Lincoln again and able continue the project research.

The last week has allowed me to start updating the project wiki which I believe will become the focus of the projects outcome.

I think that with the amount of work already completed on Sugar, including Sugar on a Stick, and with help from the Fedora Edu Spin, we will be able to push forward into being able to produce a bootable pen drive image which will allow users to install and develop sugar activities.

This is actually already possible; however some prior knowledge is needed in order to set up with the software, development files and necessary information to create activities. (Such as getting a hold of, updating and building Sugar Jhbuild, the development version of Sugar, etc.)

The best route that this UROS project could now direct its attention, at least in my opinion; would be to provide the above knowledge in the form of tutorials and wiki information for entry level access users.
By that I mean users who know nothing about OLPC or Sugar, but want to learn and subsequently create activities, or in any case just the latter part of creating activities without a platform to work from.

A best case scenario as Iv discussed with James would be to have some static format of the wiki in a final stage snapshot already on the image provided, meaning users without an internet connection could still make use of the materials provided.

Those with a connection could then access the latest version online, and contribute towards the wiki with any problems or updates they encounter.

This is Karl signing off, thanks!

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Day 22: Progress

Karl L OLPC, SUGAR , , , , ,

Things feel like they have been moving a little more over the past week, and with Andy’s return to the project from his camp away, we should hopefully be able to produce some useful work!

Following on from where I left you, aside from our results celebrations, last week Day 18 (2009.07.08) Day 19 (2009.07.09) and Day 20 (2009.07.10) continued with getting Sugar JHbuild to work, and after some discussions with the developers, I finally found myself pulling, updating and building a version of the latest Sugar JHbuild successfully onto the laptop.

This then allowed me to correctly get the sugar emulator working from the build, meaning I should now be able to mess around with the build code for Sugar, and hopefully learn how to introduce my own activities. It is possible to do very useful things with the emulator, such as run multiple profile instances in order to test XO collaboration etc.

During the build I had found myself with more errors, which when I asked the developers, was able to be guided onto the correct course of action, along with asking me to actively contribute by raising a ticket over at Sugar Labs Development, in order to allow the developers to diagnose and fix the problem.

After further talks with Sebastian over what I can do to contribute, I soon found myself writing some basic tutorials for anyone else who might be new and come along attempting to get Sugar JH build working.
These were uploaded to the Education Spin Wiki which were made in order to allow access to the Education Spin, allowing members to build their own version.

The Education Spin Wiki can be found here, along with the Getting Started Page with some tutorials here. The idea for the tutorials is to allow anyone who might be new to Linux, OLPC or Open Source projects in general to get involved as easily as possible by stepping them through the start up processes required to for example, get Sugar JH build working.

This also prompted me to create accounts with Fedora and Sugar Labs Git in order to allow me to contribute to the Wiki and hopefully Sugar Project. Along with this I managed to finally create my own SSH Key to develop with.

Day 21 (2009.07.13) and Day 22 (2009.07.14) saw Andy return to the project, and allowed for Cornelia, Andy and I to have an informal meet on how the project is going and where we would like to head.

With the date of the Nottingham Unconference looming and its day Programme released, we also planned out what materials we would need, and so after registering that we would attended, agreed that we would be bringing a handout along with demonstration of the Codex project, in order to hype interest about OLPC and the Sugar project to other Conference attendees.
We plan to update the Codex Wiki created last year, using it as a portal for those who want to follow on from our leaflet.

Finally we also got a link to the missing puzzle pieces of last years Git Codex Sample along with Tutorial Content, meaning we can hopefully adapt some content that was created last year, carrying on the cycle. – Over and out!

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Day 4: Up and Down

Karl L OLPC, SUGAR , , , , ,

There have been a few setbacks for Andy and I over the beginning days of the projects which have caused a few problems, however this isn’t dampening our spirits!

Day 2 (2009.06.16) started with some more research and digging into the previous work done last year, Andy also suggested the idea of trying to get an easy installer for users to load an ISO with Sugar on to a pen drive in a simple easy step, however we soon found ourselves with the revelation of finding and testing Sugar On a Stick, which has been developed by the guys over at SugarLabs. The site links to an interview in Feburary 2009 which discussed the developments of Sugar on a Stick, and the reasonings to allow any system to load the Sugar Interface, following on from OLPC’s divorce from Sugar early last year.

Currently still in Beta, Sugar On a Stick is essentially what we have been looking for over the first few days in attempting to migrate the Sugar Emulator from the Live CD onto a pen drive. It works through a combination of Fedora LiveUSB creator and and ISO loaded with the Sugar Interface, allowing users to load the ISO easily from an installer package onto a pen drive. We tested the version that was available and soon found ourselves successfully booting from a pen drive into the sugar interface, which seemed to work from what we tested (including the web browser!) without any need to change settings.

This seemed to change things (and the project) a little bit, as it looked like with the changes to the OLPC and Sugar Team, things had moved on from last years project, and there was already a development team actively working in this area, so instead of competing, the next natural idea would be to find out whats currently being done, and where we could help (if at all).

All seemed well from this point on, however later that afternoon I ran into a snag which caused me some problems when I found out that the lab computers we had been working on were infected with some virus’s, go figure! With all the hot swapping of the pen drives and no warning from any of the machines default scanners, I only found out we had a problem when I got home and found that the infections apparently run hidden auto scripts to infect any drives on a system, and if portable, attempt to infect new host systems once they are inserted into a computer.

This has put me back a little bit, as I haven’t been able to work from home, and we needed to sort the PC’s in the Labs out too. This shouldnt have been such a big problem as I could easily reformat my machine, however it turns out all 3 places where I keep my backups were infected during the afternoon, not much luck here! Untill I can safley find a way to either remove the infections or save my data and format, things might run a little slow.

Day 3 (2009.06.17) started with attempting to sort the virus problem out, and in the mean time, trying to get in contact with some of the developers of the Sugar Labs; which actually turned out to be very successful!
Using one of the uninfected pen drives that we created Monday to boot into the safety of Ubuntu, we found the IRC Channels that the Sugar Team use and introduced ourselves!

The initial talk with the developers turned out to be very positive, with a welcoming attitude they were very excited to hear that there were some research students looking out to help.

The developers were able to help and inform Andy and I quiet alot, with recent events, whats happening at the moment, and where we could possibly help, along with also providing a range of useful links.

It transpires that the team are trying to put together and release an “Educational Fedora Spin” to coincide with an Open Source Development Conference named “POSSE” (19th July – 24th July 2009) which aims to “create a ready-to-go development environment for contributing to educational packages within the Fedora ecosystem.” In this case the development environment would be a system for the Sugar Interface, which would allow users (students alike) to easily get involved in developing for the sugar interface , which is a very exciting prospect as it is exactly what the Codex project is all about.

Reading the POSSE details also seems to be the heart of where the Codex project is coming from.
From the looks of it the developers are more than happy to use us as gunie pigs and mentor us through the testing and developing of the current builds in preparation for the conference and thereafter. At the moment I’m not entirely sure what this entails, and will need to keep in contact with them, but I’m pretty sure this is a good place for the project to be heading!

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