Sugar on Windows

[Sameer Verma]

NoiseEHC wrote:
> You seem to miss this:
>
>   
>>> Depending how you define "Sugar"...
>>>       
> See?
>   
>>> I don't want to waste too much time discussing Sugar on Windows. But  
>>> stating this is a 1-man effort is ridiculous -  unless you are  
>>> speaking of emulating a whole Linux installation.
>>>
>>>     
>>>       
> I was talking about to port it so that anyone could run sugar activities 
> on windows. Porting the whole shell is totally pointless I think, and 
> replacing all the native windows apps would took years to implement.
>
>   
My understanding of what Nicholas said on the list is that if "Sugar" (I 
use quotes because its definition may vary) can be separated from the OS 
(Fedora, at this moment) then it can run on any platform that supports 
it execution. The advantage will be that if you have computers with 
Windows or MacOSX or [your favorite OS] you will not have to go and get 
an XO or Linux or any other significant dependencies to run "Sugar". 
Based on Nicholas'  "yolk + egg white" vs. "omelet" analogy if we manage 
to virtualize the yolk, then it can run on any egg white (hen, quail, 
ostrich, etc.).

So, here's a thought. If I want my nephew to use "Sugar" on his father's 
Windows Vista machine in Mountain View, CA, or my other nephew in India 
who has been given a hand-me-down Win 98 box or my neighbor's son who 
has a Mac, then what if they could run the whole darn thing in a virtual 
environment? A VM that is "Sugar" + Fedora. Its still the whole omelet 
that thinks its a yolk, and the users get to keep their egg whites.

Attempting to port Sugar onto a Windows shell-only environment is 
pointless because, the bread and butter for the Windows world is the 
look and feel. Without that look and feel, its just kinda like DOS. 
Those who are supposedly demanding Windows on the XO will not be 
satisfied with a Windows OS Shell only. They want their "Start" button 
and everything else. Therefore, I think the whole move to including 
Windows in the mix isn't about the OS (as in kernel+shell) but the UI as 
well.  If that is indeed true, then Sugar is really only an application 
running on top of Windows, and it might very well be virtualized 
(VMWare, VirtualBox, QEMU, VirtualPC, etc.) See more at 
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OS_images_for_emulation

This approach will not provide the benefits of power saving hardware, 
mesh, etc. (those issues will be between the host OS and its 
relationship with its hardware) but it will provide a consistent 
experience.

Thoughts?

Sameer

-- 
Dr. Sameer Verma, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Information Systems
San Francisco State University
San Francisco CA 94132 USA
http://verma.sfsu.edu/
http://opensource.sfsu.edu/