Sugar on a Stick/FAQ

Even though I've tried to keep a close eye on the breathtaking development of SoaS over the past few weeks there are still some basic questions I'm wondering about, all related to how well SoaS runs on the various netbooks.

What I'm basically trying to find out

is whether *today* running SoaS on a netbook is a *real* alternative to XOs with build 767 when it comes to classroom settings?

For the OLPC XO hardware, we are targeting F12 as the timeframe for the switch. In the meantime, on that hardware, we recommend the 80X series of builds from OLPC. But by all means, please test SoaS on your XO hardware (you'll need a developer key) and give us feedback. On all other hardware, SoaS, while just in Beta, is looking really great!!

Have the resolution issues, which used to be a major issue w/ running Sugar on a non-XO, been solved?

While not every activity has been modified, most now accommodate variable screen sizes. All of the activities at http://activities.sugarlabs.org work at variable sizes and resolutions as far as I know.

• What about font sizes?

  This is also fixed in Sucrose 0.84

Do all the activities (incl. collaboration) work reliably on SoaS these days?

Collaboration on SoaS is as robust as collaboration anywhere. (There is a Google Summer of Code project that will be addressing one general issue of collaboration robustness--this will be relevant to SoaS and non-SoaS deployments.)

There are some NetworkManager issues that need to be worked out in general regarding Sugar on non-OLPC kernels, but this impacts connectivity, not collaboration.

Does SoaS allow for power-management to kick in on netbooks?

Yes, but currently not the special OLPC XO features.

What exactly are the networking and audio issues that Walter described in yesterday's Sugar-Digest?

AFAIK, the audio problems are fixed in the new Beta.

We have found some issues with connectivity with a small number of machines--this seems to be a Fedora issue, not a Sugar issue, and is being worked on upstream.