Gardner Pilot Academy

Gardner Pilot Academy - Boston Public Schools - Allston http://www.rabbitnet.net/gpa/

GPA is partnering with Solution Grove and Sugar Labs to pilot Sugar on a Stick.

Currently they have:

A computer lab with about 20 EVO D500 Pentium 4 computers running Windows 2000
20 new Apple laptops in a mobile cart (OSX, hardware details unknown, no Parallels)
Each teacher has a MacBook with Parallels 3.0

There are two teachers in the school especially interested in starting with Sugar

4th Grade teacher wants to do portfolios
Science Teacher wants to pilot with the 5th grade to support a new district mandate for writing in Science.

Status for the Computer Lab

Sugar on a Stick boots with the F9.9 Boot Helper CD!

However it does not see the network card and thus there is no internet connection. F11 boots and does see the network card. We didn't get to test that it actually connected to the internet.

Relevant Tickets:

http://dev.sugarlabs.org/ticket/265 - F11 Boot Helper may have the driver we need to see the internet

Can't get Machines to Boot from USB - The BIOS says it should be trying to boot from the USB but its not looking at the USB. A google search confirms that this is not a sugar problem, its a EVO D500 problem. I'm hoping we find a solution. http://dev.sugarlabs.org/ticket/599

Google Search on EVO D500 usb boot gives this result: http://forums13.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/bizsupport/questionanswer.do?admit=109447627+1237587827991+28353475&threadId=1038476

If we don't we can work around in a few different ways.

A virtual machine that looks for student files and identity on the USB.
Boot Helper CD
Boot Helper Floppy - This is easier then a CD because the computer has to be turned on to open the CD Drawer and put in the CD then you have to turn it off again and reboot.http://dev.sugarlabs.org/ticket/597

Enhancement Tickets

The following tickets would be helpful for this deployment.

Tux Paint for the younger kids to play with this summer. - 886 and 887
An installable Boot Helper. When people donate computers that have hard-drives, but they want the hard drive wiped,we should install on the hard-drive a boot environment that always looks for a USB - 579
A boot helper on a floppy disk. Its a real pain to use CD boot-helpers. You have to turn on the computer, eject the CD, put in the boot-helper, restart the computer and repeat the process when you turn it off. It would be much easier to have a floppy disk that we could just leave with the computer. No one uses the Floppy anymore so it could just sit in the computer and people could push it in when they wanted to boot into Sugar. 597
Virtual Machine that reads personal data off of the USB, in other words a boot-helper VM. This might be a useful option and faster then turning off the computer and doing a total reboot into Sugar and then rebooting back into Windows/Mac OS - 598
The computer lab computers claim to be able to boot from USB but aren't. We are trying to figure out why in Ticket 599.