[sugar] Greetings from New Hampsire

[David Farning]

On Thu, Oct 23, 2008 at 3:25 PM, Brendan R. Powers <brendan at resara.com>wrote:

> Greetings,
>

Hey Brendan,
Welcome to the list!

>
> Our company and developers are interested in getting involved with the
> development community for Sugar. We deploy Linux desktop solutions in
> schools in the United States via thin client and fat client methods. We
> believe that Sugar's collaboration tools, journal,  and other features could
> be very appealing to younger grade (elementary and middle school) students
> and teachers. Several of our schools are interested in using Sugar in the
> classrooms already on their thin client desktops.
>

Very cool, we are interested in making Sugar available to a wider audience!



>
> We have the Ubuntu packages running fine, but it is evident that there are
> changes that should be made to Sugar when its not being used on the OLPC.
> Some of the challenges for deploying Sugar on desktops in a school
> environment are different than using it on standalone OLPCs, which need to
> be overcome for Sugar to take a major foothold independent of the OLPC.
> Below we have listed some of the issues we think need to be addressed based
> on our experience with working in schools.
>


What would be your preferred work flow? One thought would be set up a
client/server git tree for client/server development.  Then, the work you,
and others do, can be pulled into the main tree.  In the near future,
SugarLabs will be hosting a git server. Either we can host a C/S tree or you
can host it yourself.

Do you use LTSP as the basis for your client server technology?


> The technical challenges we see are mostly problems integrating sugar into
> a thin client architecture, and into the networks of schools. One of the
> most immediate changes we will need to make are customizations to the
> interface. For example, thin clients may not need the shutdown and reboot
> options, and need a logout option. There are other customizations that we
> may need to make, such as adding or removing items from the control panel.
> These sorts of changes are small, and once done will allow people to deploy
> sugar in a small classroom environment.
>
> On larger installations, schools will want sugar to integrate with there
> existing file and print servers, as well as some centralized administration
> of the sugar interface. Ideally, the journal and datastore would be stored
> on the file server in such a way as to allow teachers to access the saved
> activities from a normal Windows or Linux computer. It would be interesting
> to see if we could launch sugar activities without running the entire sugar
> interface. Also, local media attached to thin client may pose a challenge,
> as the normal ways to search for and mount media are not available.
>
> Another important aspect of larger sugar deployments would be the ability
> of admins to customize the user interface. For example they may not want
> users to have access to the control panel, or may want to set up the list of
> activities per grade, and prevent users from installing there own
> activities.
>
> One of the most interesting aspects of sugar is its collaboration features,
> but this too poses some difficulties. In multi classroom environments its
> not clear how the collaboration would work. Ideally there would be one
> jabber server for the entire network. This would mean that every student on
> the network could see every other student on the network, when the desired
> behavior may be to only see the students in the current class.
>

Using the Jabber server in a non-xs environment is a issue on which we are
only just now starting to focus.  We have a lot of work to do.


> These are some of the issues were thinking about. We could solve most of
> these problem by creating our own custom build of sugar with the patches
> needed to integrate with our current software. However, we would rather work
> with the community to create solutions to the problems. For example, one of
> the things we would like to do is to extend the profile class to allow for
> multiple back ends, as well as the ability to store generic settings. This
> would allow us to integrate some of the important profile settings, such as
> the jabber server, into our management software, while at the same time
> keeping a consistent API and keeping our code separate from the sugar tree.
>

Thanks for you willingness to work with us!  By Monday, Marco our lead
developer will be able to answer you questions in more detail.

thanks
david

>
> We are very excited about the possibilities that sugar provides. We look
> forward to contributing to this project, and we are interested in your
> thoughts about these issues.
>
>
>
> -----------------------
> Brendan Powers
> Resara LLC
>
> 1.888.357.9195
> www.resara.com
>
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> Sugar at lists.laptop.org
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>
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