WSJ

[Mike C. Fletcher]

Yoshiki Ohshima wrote:
...
>>         * we should port to the other inexpensive laptops, if a country
>>           decides to go with EEEs or Classmates, we should be in there
>>           offering an EEE or Classmate-optimised Sugar + Activities +
>>           Content that they can load onto those machines
>>               o we should also port to the thin-client-style setups seen
>>                 in e.g. Canonical's deployments of computing labs in the
>>                 developing world
>>     
>
>   It sounded in the article, though, that some countries have chosen
> Classmates because of MS Windows.  How about porting parts of current
> OLPC software that is worthwhile for Windows users?  What would such
> parts be?
>   
It would mostly be a matter of porting the underlying software stack...
which would be, from what I understand, non-trivial.  We are using a
large number of system services as the basis of our system, and while
those system services are becoming standard on Linux, they are either
not available or only minimally available on Windows systems.  That is,
while it might be doable, it would be far more involved than getting
Sugar running on other Linux distributions.

That said, activities which use the high-level components only might be
able to be ported just by rewriting the Sugar APIs with a Win32
compatibility layer a port of Telepathy and a bit of bailing wire.  That
might let children communicate and access the materials... but that
would be a fairly involved project, and I don't know if we'd find all
that many Win32 developers interested in attempting it.
>   And, I see that one of the biggest downside of our software is that
> kids cannot participate the software development effort from their
> laptops (except...).  If we are to look at different platforms, it is
> nice to think about easy support of on-laptop-development.  I don't
> care if it is on Windows or Mac OS; on top of Windows (or Mac OS), you
> as an end-user can still do a lot.  (Basically the same argument in
> "filtered Internet access is better than no Internet access".)
>   
Yes, we really need to get "Develop" development un-stuck.  We currently
have only Pippy (which doesn't do files) and the Squeak IDE available
on-machine.  We need that full Python IDE available for the children
ASAP.  After all, we've got a whole key on the keyboard devoted to it. 
Even if the IDE is just file-open/close/create, file-tabs and syntax
highlighting it would be sufficient to start programming on-machine.

Take care,
Mike

-- 
________________________________________________
  Mike C. Fletcher
  Designer, VR Plumber, Coder
  http://www.vrplumber.com
  http://blog.vrplumber.com