$100 Laptop Platform Moves On

The BBC is reporting that Sugar Labs is planning on taking "Sugar," the XO laptop's innovative interface, to the next level and distribute to a broader audience. "Sugar is a user interface that allows children to collaborate even when working on different machines. For example, they can write documents or make music together. The open source software also contains a journal and automatically saves and backs up all data. [...] Sugar Labs will work closely with developers from the open source community to develop the user interface for other computers and operating systems. It has already been bundled with the most recent releases of the Ubuntu and Fedora Linux operating systems."

Loose translation:

"We've royally buggered things up, software porting to Sugar is limited, quality of code is limited, and developers are leaving, so we'll outsource management of the project to someone who can handle it. Besides, it'll be easier to keep Microsoft happy, if we can deny all responsibility for Sugar working and Windows not."

Re:

2009 will be the year of the Suger desktop.

Re:Loose translation:

I was under the impression that this was more of a voluntarily, albeit unwanted, exodus from OLPC by the devs who actually care about Sugar

Re:Loose translation:

No, this is... OLPC + Microsoft sucks, but Sugar is still a good idea.

Re:Loose translation:

It is the best thing for them and you've got to know, just a spoon full of Sugar will make the Windows go down in the most delightful way.

LoB

Re:Loose translation:

just a spoon full of Sugar will make the Windows go down

You don't need Sugar for that.

Re:Loose translation:

Sugar only helps when the medication is oral, windows is much more like a large placebo suppository, it hurts to use and it doesn't do actually anything.

Re:Loose translation:

Let me see if I can give you a couple of clu^H^H^Hanswers....

1) MS is not offering their software from the beneficence of samaritan spirit. They are offering it at that price to ensure that even the 5th world will be hooked on their constant upgrade and pay to play cycles. $3/CD is better than zero, and it will lead to sales later on. In the marketing world it's called a loss leader... http://www.investopedia.com/terms/l/lossleader.asp [investopedia.com]

2) More functionality in this case includes wasted battery usage through OS issues, BSODs, virus prone applications, upgrade cycles that are longer than the XO will be a viable product (read no upgrades)

3) No matter what language it supports, XP still has the same problems, so this is not much of a bonus, here is some data to see what the real language support is:
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Linux_language_support [laptop.org]
http://www.microsoft.com/globaldev/handson/dev/winxpintl.mspx [microsoft.com]

Now, when it comes down to it, neither is likely to support a dialect that is spoken by only several thousand people in the world, but both support a large number of languages making this an odd point to harp on. I've given you a couple of links, perhaps you can point out to the rest of us what huge advantage XP offers over Linux in general and the XO's original system in particular.

3) Redhat, Novell, Canonical et al were not asked to step up. OLPC chose their operating system and MS 'convinced' them to re-choose. I say convinced with all the irony that I can muster in this life and the next. MS is offering a raped version of XP, and not the version you are obviously used to.

Sugar OS was just right for the OLPC and with a few tweaks would have been very nice for the goals of that project.

As for your general attitude in your comment, I offer this review as rebuttal. It's from http://www.engadget.com/tag/olpc [engadget.com] and the emphasis below is mine.

It's been a controversial decision, but it looks like the OLPC XO has completed its transition from revolutionary education project to just another tiny Windows laptop with a useless keyboard -- albeit one with a pleasantly whimsical design. Yep, it's official: Microsoft and OLPC just put out a joint press release saying that XP-loaded XOs will be available starting in August or September, with some countries to get the machines as soon as next month. Users will get all the regular functionality of XP -- it's basically the same build as on the Eee and other ultraportables -- but Microsoft's spent over a year developing specialized drivers for the XO's various features like e-book mode, the writing pad, and camera. (We're pretty certain that doesn't include mesh networking, but WiFi is supported.) XP is too big for the built-in 1GB flash chip, so it'll come preloaded on a 2GB SD card, leaving just about 1.5GB free total for apps and media. It seems like Microsoft is thrilled about this partnership, but it's a not going to make NickNeg's search for new vision at the top any easier. As for Sugar? You'll still be able to get it, but we have a sinking feeling about its future. Demo video after the break.

I realize that you seem to have been throwing down the gauntlet for the Linux fanbois, but you would be wise to remember to bring more than a knife to a gun fight.

Re:Loose translation:

In the marketing world it's called a loss leader...

No, its not a loss leader. With a loss leader you lose money or don't make any, MS isn't doing that. A copy of XP costs exactly $0 for MS to produce. Granted, XP did have some costs related to development but now, we are around 6 years into XP and we can assume those have been paid off. With a physical product each copy costs money, in parts, in time, in shipping. With software each copy can be recopied an infinate amount of times without any loss in quality or any increase in cost, compare this to a gallon of milk where each cow can only produce so much milk. Whereas a gallon of milk has costs related to packaging, software doesn't have this problem with downloads where the price of bandwidth is tiny to almost unnoticeable and using more modern P2P technology makes even those costs go away, likewise shipping is free.

This is not a loss leader for MS, a copy of XP costs them exactly $0 to make, and they get $3 for each copy so that is a direct $3 profit for each system with XP sold.

Re:Loose translation:

I dislike MS as much as anybody else here, but they did put forth time and money developing drivers and the like specifically to make XP run on the XO. (hmm, would be easy to make that a typo)

Additionally, there are costs associated with maintaining XP with security updates and bugfixes, running product activation servers, knowledge base servers (all of which need to be maintained) and all kinds of other expenses such as licensing of media technologies.

Don't get me wrong, I greatly dislike MS, but to say there are no costs associated with it is dead wrong. These cost do, however, often apply to open source companies as well, and most certainly some of them apply to OLPC. It may well be that going with MS's deal is just cheaper than doing it all in-house.

Cool

Love that they a)wanna focus on usability b)are still keeping to the project aims c)recognizing that people will happily use sugar on anything if it's good. I think sugar is adorable, wanna throw it on my laptop when I babysit, so I think this could be a good teaching tool. One interface with clicky pictures is easier to work with when teaching, even if there are all sorts of games separately-look at the whole jumpstart line of games. So I'm really psyched, though it'd be nice to have a live usb/live cd version.

Re:Cool

Actually, the Fedora based LiveCD is out of date and there are better options available. More details can be found on the OLPC wiki: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/LiveCd [laptop.org]

The next level.

Sugar Labs is planning on taking "Sugar" to the next level and distribute to a broader audience

It will also be renamed HFCS [wikipedia.org] to increase marketability. :-)

Re:The next level. But, will it be...

-Equal
-Neutral(trasweet), or
-(Aser)Tame?

If they add Sugar CRM, will it be SCHWEET?

don't you mean the $190 latptop.

why the fuck do some people insist on calling it the $100 laptop? did they not pass grade school maths?

attention racist slashdot posters

For the last time, the man's name is Nicholas Africanamericanponte. I've learned to expect a little racism in Slashdot articles, but when even the story submitters are doing it, things have gone too far.

And whatever you do, don't respond to this post with your favorite humorous variation of Mr. Africanamericanponte's name. That would be truly depraved.

P.S. My "captcha" word is "enemas". No joke. This place is sick.

Re:attention racist slashdot posters

by Anonymous Coward

It really should say "by courage-challenged person of an alternative identifier."

Inexpensive laptops are important, Sugar is not

Having spent a considerable amount of time with Sugar, I've come to the sad conclusion that Sugar is the weakest part of the entire OLPC project.

I'm ecumenical when it comes to operating systems and user interfaces. I use Sugar, Macintosh, Windows (both XP and Vista), Red Hat Enterprise, Ubuntu, Nokia IT OS (Debian variant), and iPod Touch on a daily basis; plus a couple of others on a less-frequent basis. I'm pretty well aware of the strengths and weaknesses of each of these platforms. I have my preferences, but am no fanboy.

Sugar's interface fails on a number of points. It is very reminiscent of the old MIT interfaces of the 1970s where hackers built what looked good to them with little/no effort to have a professional designer tell them what to do (much less say "no" to bad UI issues).

The icons and graphical elements are poorly considered, and design decisions seem to be based more on "be different from anything else" than what makes sense. Typical are the icons for "Erase" and "Resume" in the Journal; these icons look like "do not enter" and "stop".

The use of color is quite poor; most of the Sugar interface is monochrome except for the little user indicator, which you can almost, but not quite, make look like what is on the lid of the XO if you do scary stuff at the UNIX shell level. The activity icons in the main interface have the same two additional colors.

Now, if they had any sense, the little user indicator would graphically match what is on the lid (presumably keyed by serial number) without impacting other icons. Even if they're limited in the main color palette (e.g., due to power considerations) they could have done that.

The actual activity icons are terrible. Some are alright (e.g., Browse and Write), but others are bizarre:

A comic strip balloon for Chat.

A snake for the Python development application (cutely called "Pippy").

The RSS application has a common RSS icon, but it's called News Reader. I can't imagine how a kid with no prior computer experience would interpret it.

Acoustic Tape Measure is an activity to measure distance between two OLPCs using sound. A cute toy, but the icons is a dolphin with sound coming out of its snout.

Additional things wrong with Sugar:

As noted about, many of the activity names are silly or simply bizarre.

There are four music activities: TamTamJam, TamTamEdit, TamTamSynthLab, and TamTamMini. These should be consolidated into a single Music activity.

There's a toy oscilloscope. OK, kids like talking into a microphone and seeing his voice show up as waves. We all remember going to the science museum as little kids and doing that. But this application is called Measure, which implies something quite a bit different.

Memorize is a sample game. Games ought to be under a general fun-and-games category.

The Terminal emulator and Log Viewer both ought to be under an advanced mode. Not necessarily hidden, but from the main activity it should be a something that indicates that you're getting into the internals (perhaps a screwdriver and pliers as an icon) and not pedagogical work.

Speaking of the log viewer, there's a lot of scary error messages in the logs suggesting that the software isn't very well debugged.

Then there is what is missing. Since the focus seems to be for education, the paucity of bundled references and the assumption that you can get what's missing from the Internet is astonishing. What is bundled seems to reflect the interests of the OLPC developers rather than pedagogical purposes.

The mouse control is idiotic and annoying (to put it mildly). In many of the activities, controls are near the edges of the screen, but if you put the pointer too near the edge Sugar takes over and you have to move the pointer back and wait.

There is no consistency in controls between activities. Every activity does things its own way, based apparently upon the individual programmer's preference. Sheesh, this is the sa

Re:Inexpensive laptops are important, Sugar is not

Sugar has some issues, mostly with applications. Too many of them are half finished. Then again, what are they going to do on XP? Play Solitaire and write notes in Wordpad? Most of the issues you listed were not with Sugar itself, but with the applications. You're right that Terminal should be hidden (new versions of the OS allow deployments to choose their own bundles of activities). Yes, there should be more reference materials included. There is an app that is being worked on that bundles portions of Wikipedia for offline access. That sort of stuff needs to be localized though.

As far as the touchpad goes, it does need some work. There has been a lot of work on drivers lately (forcing re-calibration more often) that should clear up some of those problems. Again though, that isn't really Sugar's fault. That is a driver problem which is the fault of either the kernel or X11.

The issue with controls being on the edge of the screen is something I've noticed. You can turn off the automatic frame thingy though (and just use the frame button to activate it). This should be the default.

There are some good games available. Tetris and SimCity are both fun. One is even sorta educational.

Some of the icons are bad, same with Windows, same with MacOSX. Why for instance is the icon for Photoshop CS a quill on a blank white square? Or my new favorite is the icons for page down and page up in Publisher 2007's print preview. You can just barely tell that there are arrows on those icons, if you look really closely.

I think it has some potential; it's certainly not perfect yet. I like the journal (though I don't like how often entries get duplicated, and activities should ask you to name them when you hit the keep button to save). All in all though, it wasn't that hard to get used to, and after having installed some non-sugar apps on it, I can see why they shied away from the traditional GUIs. I would say that their fear of overlapping windows is a bit intense, especially in Browse where it actually renders many pages unusable if they require a usernam/password prompt in a dialog(perhaps having dialogs that work like ones in MacOS X, where they slide out of the titlebar would work).

Also, I believe Apple offered MacOS X for free but they were turned down.

The Sugar Labs home page

Surprisingly, nobody posted the URL yet: http://www.sugarlabs.org/ [sugarlabs.org] .

More Grand Delusions

Neither this software nor any other, nor cheap laptops will ever have any impact on the education of children or anyone else. The reason the Socratic Method of teaching (questioning and debate to greatly simplify it) has existed for more than 2000 years is because it works. When Socrates used it he had an arena of interested students who in their search for knowledge questioned him and proposed arguments. Their collaboration in producing documents on wax tablets or playing the lyre communally had the following measurable impact on their learning: zero.

We learn by asking questions that are important to us. Teaching leads the child to ask questions that may or may not turn out to be important to them (although I'm going to give you a free pass on calculus) but will equip them with the skills required for employment.

This is the fundamental purpose of the industrialised method of teaching children on the grand scale where they are incarcerated in school from the age of 4 to 16 (I'm using my native Scotland as the model here, other rates may vary.) I am a teacher, I am not terribly impressed by a lot of my colleagues but in their defense - no machine or application can do what a teacher does. This is why so many great creative minds were produced in the last century in the post-war period - people had the freedom to think.

Of course by the sixties school boards were squandering valuable financial resources on TVs, movie projectors, film loops and other idiotic assorted garbage to the detriment of spending money on traditional classroom resources - books, desks, chalk and teachers and by this time the career was held in such contempt and so poorly paid that the schools were filled with the empty-headed using sociologically based - learning by screaming or whatever dumb theory of the day was popular and all conducted in the language of political correctness.

A quick look at some figures (freely available on the Scottish government website) shows how much the Scottish states spend on education from a GDP of approximately 56 billion GBP.

• expenditure per primary school pupil 2700 GBP total =18900 GBP from P1 to p7 amounting to almost 8 billion GBP for the nation
• annual expenditure per high school pupil 3900 GBP total 19,500 from year 1 to year 5 amounting to 6 billion GBP for the nation

Have a look at any private schools (curiously called public schools in Britain) where the paying customer determines what is considered a successful curriculum.

The have computers where they should be, in the computer classes.

Re:Included in distros?

Its in universe.

sugar:
Installed: (none)
Candidate: 0.79.0-0ubuntu3
Version table:
0.79.0-0ubuntu3 0
500 http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com/ hardy/universe Packages

Re:Included in distros?

just do this:

1) sudo apt-get install sugar sugar-activities xserver-xephyr

2) create xephr-xinitrc file in your home directory with this line in it: exec /usr/bin/sugar

3) run this to start it in a windowed xserver:
xinit ~/xephyr-xinitrc -- /usr/bin/Xephyr :1 -ac -screen 800x600 -dpi 72

LoB

Re:Asus got it right

As the proud owner of two Asus EeePCs and someone who has experimented with the Sugar interface in virtual machines (I live in the UK, so no G1G1 option was offered here or I would have bought the XO machine as well), I think that is a little unfair.
If nothing else, the OLPC project was responsible for the low priced UMPCs which we can now buy - remember the price of a UMPC a year or two ago? It was cheaper to buy a pretty high spec (but full size) machine.
The OLPC project has lost its way - perhaps because of Negroponte, perhaps because of Intel or maybe pressure from other (Redmond?) forces. Whatever, the OLPC original idea was great - create a functional, robust laptop and include a user friendly interface, a simple peer to peer networking system to allow sharing of files between these machines, an OS which allowed you to learn how things worked etc.
Because of the political infighting which has taken place, the project seems to have lost the support of those who would be of most use to it - i.e Open Source enthusiasts who could have worked on the XO machines and the Sugar interface to create new programs. So the folks behind that Sugar interface have taken it to the community in the form of this new effort called Sugar Labs - intending to develop, with the assistance of the community, the interface and make it available for other small UMPC machines - including the EeePC.
IMHO, this is to be applauded and I for one will certainly have a look at it again. The only small snag at the moment is that it doesn't seem to like running in my VM install of Kubuntu. But I am sure I can find a spare drive here somewhere to install (K)Ubuntu 8.04 or another supported system and fire up the Sugar interface.

Re:I don't like Sugar

I think they missed the mark and made it somewhat difficult to use. Oh and be sure to watch the kids struggle to open it the first time they get their hands on it.

I agree completely-it looks like it could be sparkly and fun for kids if it's cleaned up, tested, and streamlined. That's where I think breaking off from OLPC and really trying to stand on it's own is a good thing. It allows for a change in structure and resources that could lead to more development of a friendly UI 'cause the focus is shifted back towards education in the like. Plus, I'm hoping that reaching for a larger audience will also give sugar strong nudge towards better UI, 'cause the average user just won't put up with sugar as it is now-they'll stay with jumpstart and all the other education suites.