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?

It is still in Beta and we feel very strongly about not overselling it. However, it is an alternative to consider today if you are an early adopter and you set a realistic rollout plan. It is Beta software so I would set the expectation that the teacher/school would want to pick out which hardware they want, pick out which activities they want to start with and test those and work closely with the community.

I am incredibly optimistic about both the technical results at FOSSVT and the excitement of the educators. Based on discussions at FOSSVT and others who have posted I'm sure that Sugar will be in kids hands on netbooks and in existing computer labs this summer.

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.

We saw some issues at FOSSVT on some laptops and netbooks accessing wireless, others worked great.

As you pointed out development is going very quickly right now. As we take this out into the world we are finding and fixing bugs. Our main goal right now is to get volunteers to help us do this and keep track of what hardware is working.

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.

Does Sugar on a Stick work on the OLPC XO Hardware

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.