Sugar on Windows

[Carol Lerche]

Virtualization has the merit of being available now (if issues like enabling
sound and adjusting to the display differences are addressed.)  The problem
with virtualization is that it extracts a performance penalty and presents
packaging issues.  (Maybe the packaging issue could be solved by sufficient
attention to making an installer that provides the virtualization
environment as well as sugar and its applications.)  Consider another
approach:  if you have used X windows on a MS Windows machine, many X
servers that run on MS systems give you a choice whether to run all X
clients within one containing window or as separate native MS windows.  By
doing the former, one can experience the "look and feel" of a different,
non-MS window manager within that group of clients.  This would be a
possible approach that doesn't incur the overhead of virtualization.

On Thu, Apr 24, 2008 at 9:12 AM, Sameer Verma <sverma at sfsu.edu> wrote:

> 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/
>
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>



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