Sugar on a Stick/Getting Involved

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Send us your Thoughts

Send e-mail to iaep@lists.sugarlabs.org. This is our "It's an Education Project" mailing list.

Help with Project Design

See Home View design for a discussion of which activities should be visible on the first view of a running Sugar system.

Help with Deployment

• We are experimenting with the Sugar Labs Moodle system to help in coordinating deployment work on this project.
• Deployment Team/School_Key Information on various Sugar on a Stick deployments.
• Protocol for April 17 Olin Play Session
• Notes from April 18th YMCA Healthy Kids Day

Help with Testing

With new builds coming frequently, it is sometimes hard to keep track of known problems and temporary workarounds. Sometimes a build will not complete the boot process, or only start certain services.

Testers can help other testers by organizing some of their findings here. Remember different hardware combinations may have different results.

Download guide: Getting SoaS (beta).

Testing SoaS

Software Testing

See Smoke test, and give technical feedback on soas@lists.sugarlabs.org.

Please keep notes on which version of Sugar on a Stick you have downloaded when reporting issues. You can refer to the name of the .iso file from the download source.

Fedora's boot menu

• When booting SoaS, you'll see for a short time a Fedora screen showing a blue solar system.
• By pressing the keyboard 'Escape' key here, you can get to Fedora's boot menu.
• There, you should find the images name in the following structure: Soas{version number}-{date of creation}
  • Pressing 'Tab' key from the boot menu will reveal the bootstrap command line. Removing the final command line parameter, 'rhgb' (RedHat graphical boot) using backspace and pressing the 'Enter' key will result in diagnostic messages being displayed on your console. Removing the 'quiet' parameter will print even more detailed messages.

Sugar version

To find out which version of the Sugar component you are using, you can look it up in the 'About my Computer' Section in 'My Settings'.

Bug reporting

Please file bug reports in The Sugar on a Stick bug tracker.

• Here are some instructions for using the bug tracker.
• See Sugar on a Stick/Bugs for all the tickets designated with the SoaS component/tag.
• You must register an account to enter new bugs.
• This link will take you to a new bug/ticket form for SoaS (once you are logged in).

Archive note: (Beginning with SoaS v2 (but ending on 04 February 2010), bugs and new features were tracked at http://launchpad.net/soas. See this announcement and this announcement.)

User test notes

Casual observations may be reported on this wiki (cross link bugs reports and test notes, as appropriate, to help document the problem).

• Find your build version in the list of testing subpages below, or

1. create a new subpage for an unlisted version by going to a page for a previous version.
2. Then, in the address line of your browser, change the of the address string before the "&action=" segment to the version of the file (taken from the file date at the download page) and press <Enter>
   (The full address line will be something like http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/index.php?title=Index.php&title=SoaS/Testing/Soas03&action=edit) For more help on this process, see this help page section.
3. Then enter a header line for your setup.
4. Finally, enter some observations.

• You may also include video notes, such as in Video Testing Sugar.

Future versions

• List all the activities you want to get included in SoaS on the roadmap wiki page, stating that you suggested it.

Join the development effort

• Development discussions take place on the Sugar-Devel email list, http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel.
• Real-time development chat is at irc://irc.freenode.net#sugar Mibbit: #sugar
• Source files are at Gitorious SoaS home
• OLPC:Rawhide-XO for the closely-related development of Sugar for the XO-1 laptop on Fedora 11.

Downloading alternative images

A variety of images for testing are available (see table below). Some of images might still be unstable; that means they might not work yet.

• The SoaS beta release is currently based on Soas2-200904141108.iso. It's the most stable version we have right now, and is recommended for general testing purposes.

• On the other hand, you can also grab a current snapshot, which includes the latest bits, but these might contain some issues and bite back. We really need your help on testing those to move forward!

• The virtual appliance is not ready for general use and is under heavy development. Any help with testing it is also appreciated, though.

available solution	current state	download location
SoaS Beta	beta quality	http://download.sugarlabs.org/soas/releases/soas-beta.iso
SoaS Snapshot	varying quality	http://download.sugarlabs.org/soas/snapshots/2/Soas2-200906221314.iso
SoaS Virtual Appliance	alpha quality	http://download.sugarlabs.org/soas/appliances/soas2-20090603.zip

Previous snapshots are provided in the subsequent directories on http://download.sugarlabs.org/soas/.

Roadmap

Review and contribute to plans and schedules on the Project roadmap page.

Subpages

• Sugar on a Stick/Getting Involved/Testing