[Community-news] on Sugar

[Tomeu Vizoso]

Thanks for sharing your ideas about Sugar with us. Some comments follow below.

On Wed, Apr 23, 2008 at 6:06 PM, Nicholas Negroponte <nn at media.mit.edu> wrote:
>
>  For this reason, Sugar needs a wider basis, to run on more Linux platforms
> and to run under Windows. We have been engaged in discussions with Microsoft
> for several months, to explore a dual boot version of the XO. Some of you
> have seen what Microsoft developed on their own for the XO. It works well
> and now needs Sugar on top of it (so to speak).

Sugar already runs in many different linux distributions and is quite
easy to make it run in others. Putting it to run in Windows in a
similar way shouldn't be too hard, but that's probably not what you
have in mind. Which kind of experience we would like to give to users
of Sugar on Windows? Exactly the same they would have on Sugar on
linux?

>  What is in front of us is an opportunity for big change. Sugar is at the
> core of it. To pretend otherwise would be a joke. That said, Sugar needs to
> be disentangled. I keep using the omelet analogy, claiming it needs to be a
> fried egg, with distinct yoke and white, rather than having the UI,
> collaborative tools, power management and radios merge into one amorphous
> blob. Otherwise, it is impossible to debug and will be limited to the small,
> albeit growing, world of the XO hardware platform.

What I personally call Sugar is quite distinct from that omelet, it
doesn't include power management nor radios. And I'd say that it's
easily ported to other linux distributions and hardware.

My understanding is that the Sugar UI is composed of inseparable
components because we wanted to give an integrated and coherent
experience. In which way are you suggesting to split Sugar?

And I don't think it's impossible to debug ;)

Thanks again,

Tomeu