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Walter Bender — Taking Sugar Beyond the XO Laptop
waderoush writes "While the One Laptop Per Child Foundation tries to reboot after drastic staff cuts, Sugar, the original open-source graphical interface for OLPC's XO Laptop, is rapidly evolving into a stand-alone learning platform that can run on any PC. Walter Bender, who left OLPC last year to start the non-profit Sugar Labs, has given a detailed interview about 'Sugar on a Stick' — the USB drive that allows any machine to boot into the Sugar environment. Bender also describes the Sugar upgrades coming in March — including better tools for file management, portfolio presentations, and Python code hacking — and talks about his hopes for expanding Sugar Labs and getting Sugar into more classrooms than OLPC can reach through its hardware."
Southern or northern water tribe?
I think that schoolkey project also uses a sugar-like interface, and there is always edu-nix.org's education-oriented distro, which many say is better - but it just uses regular old KDE.
>"...the USB drive that allows any machine to boot into the Sugar environment."
Any machine? Like a bowling ball polisher? Gotta say....wow - just wow!
Does this mean Sugar is making lemonade out of lemons?
If the interface has to be approachable to a toddler, it might disappoint adults...
... "A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer" and infused it with nanotech, but that's just me.
Bite my sugary metal arse?
What I found most interesting about the OLPC wasn't Sugar, the networking, or even the hardware. It's the Bitfrost security system, which is a different take on implementing security.
To my mind, it presents a radical way of approaching security, and seems entirely different from that taken by Microsoft. That is, instead of locking out applications based on whether they have proper credentials, it locks applications out based on bad behaviors.
I'd like to see this approach taken and explored more fully. Linux and other Open Source OSs will be facing more exploits and attacks, and a security model based on how trustworthy an application behaves instead of the credentials it carries seems a much saner approach.
I can only say one thing:
"Give me some sugar, baby"
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Before everyone that has an XO goes crazy and start dumping on Sugar, please remember the target market. Put it in front of an elementary age student and see how easily they take to it. Of course, I've noticed that they take to even inefficient desktops pretty quickly also. It is old people (like teenagers) that can't handle having an icon moved.
A lot of people bash the environment as being bad. But I doubt they use it. It is a bit different that a PC/MAC but really other than file storage (which you can do via the terminal the old fashioned way) it is really a good interface. I actually have one, and would use it more if I actually bought a USB keyboard. That keypad is not much better than a cell phone qwerty pad (other than the spill resistance and cool green color).
My addiction: Arguing with idiots. AKA Slashdot!
At one, my son had no problems with either Ubuntu's or Window's interfaces. The "difficulty" in day to day desktop use is a fabrication by people who just don't want to use the computer, and want an excuse other than "I just don't want to.", as well as those that just want something to complain about even if they have to make something up.
And here I thought "Mandriva" was the worst name in OSS.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I read the article, and one of Walter Bender's comments jumped out at me:
This is the best thing about Sugar for the long run. In the old days of Apple ][ or Commodore 64 computers, lots of software was written in BASIC; and it wasn't too hard to interrupt the program, look around inside it, and even tweak it a bit. The hardest part was the sucky BASIC language. Now Sugar is being explicitly designed to not only make this kind of tweaking possible, but encourage it and make it as easy as possible. And Python is the best language they could have possibly chosen for encouraging school kids to try to tweak things.
If you read the article, you can read about how they have extended the "Turtle Art" program to allow programming the turtle movement in Python. So someone can learn trivial programming by chaining control blocks together, and then learn somewhat more advanced programming to script a special block in Python, and then perhaps move from there to tweaking the behavior of other parts of the system.
P.S. The OLPC project proper seems to be walking away from this sort of constructionist learning; putting Windows on a laptop is the total opposite of the above approach. I really wonder what Negroponte is thinking.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
But, meh. Easier to blame the users, yes?
Sugar just couldn't deliver. Anybody with a clue about software development could have predicted it.
Just look at the mess:
We write an ENTIRELY NEW and FULLY INCOMPATIBLE toy interface in a REALLY SLOW language that is only mildly popular with free software programmers. Meanwhile, we discourage free software developers by helping Microsoft and by using proprietary wireless/EC/keyboard firmware.
Prior to about 1 year ago, incompatibility was even somewhat considered a virtue!
Now the OLPC leadership wants to go with XP. Is there any surprise? In their eyes Linux has been confused with the mess that is Sugar. Sugar-free Linux doesn't get considered.
We could have tweaked a regular Linux desktop for the XO. With far less effort, we'd have far better results. But no, we implement a joke designed by people who've obviously never read The Mythical Man Month and obviously never worked on resource-constrained hardware before.
Worse than that: It'll be a GUI for a toddler that has to be administered by someone with Sysadmin skills, due to lack of poor vertical integration with the rest of the OS.
We don't need yet another GUI -- We need a reference platform, from the kernel up through the GUI control panel. We need a holistic starting point that tech support departments, end-users and app developers alike can confidently work with (and build deltas from when required).
This segregation between OS layers isn't working.
I have an old friend who commented that having to use a horizontal scrollbar in an iframe on a web page was "soooo hard". You can't and shouldn't try to please everybody.
Horizontal scroll is evil, and any kind of scroll on an iframe is doubly evil. So what you've got there is 2*evil^2
Why is this? Well, when you're dealing with a language that's formatted like English - that is, rows of text, horizontal scroll means you have to scroll twice for each line. UI generally isn't very well suited to scrolling in more than one direction, either - except in cases where you can scroll by dragging the content, it usually requires going from one scrollbar to the other to find your info.
Now, combine that with the problems caused by scrolling an iframe - specifically, the scrollbars for the iframe are themselves part of scrolled content - so if you scroll up or left one of your scrollbars may disappear completely - or you may scroll up in the main window to view the top half of your iframe, scroll down to read the bottom half... Click the iframe scrollbar to page down the iframe and then scroll back up on the main window to see the top half of the iframe again...
Saying that this process makes working with such a page "hard" isn't exactly a good, clear expression of what's wrong with it... But there's lots of things wrong with an interface like that. It's just bad design, bad design that goes beyond the realm of ignorance and into incompetence.
Bow-ties are cool.
I don't use it because it's bad. I tried, but Sugar is a bad idea dreamed up by theorists attached to their ideas of how children should learn, not on any actual observation or testing.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
I have this theory that if I eat nothing but sugar, I won't get diabetes.
Actually, diabetes is caused by sleeping on your back.
We don't need yet another GUI -- We need a reference platform, from the kernel up through the GUI control panel. We need a holistic starting point that tech support departments, end-users and app developers alike can confidently work with (and build deltas from when required).
This segregation between OS layers isn't working.
It's an interesting point - one that I've given some thought to, myself. Adoption is always an issue with such a thing... But that aside, what would you suggest?
I guess what I'd say is that the "standard base" for the system should include at least an object broker as well as a system-wide database (analogous to COM and the registry in Windows) - seems like these are pretty basic requirements for GUI environments. I suppose the whole "registry" concept could be skipped, even, if the filesystem were used for that job... But that might require using it differently (there are advantages to referencing objects by GUID, as opposed to the typical Unix method of path/filename... GUIDs, in practice, don't need to be centrally managed to prevent conflicts. Pathnames potentially do.) Having all these GUI concepts implemented as a system wholly separate from the core environment always bothered me, though, I think having the object broker, at the very least, integrated into the "core system" would be a big improvement.
Of course, what is integration, really? It's not really about integration into the kernel (though that helps, in certain cases) - it's more about establishing the presence of that service as a standard facet of the system - making its presence an assumption in all software running on the system.
"There's no link between diabetes and diet. That's a white myth, Ken, like Larry Bird or Colorado."
What's your suggested better alternative for a just starting to read kid who doesn't get to play with a computer that much? The sugar turtle application has been really good fun. Also some of the educational games. I can believe that there's lots of misguided stuff, but I don't think that there's ever been a complete educational environment, so I don't see how anyone could have done real observation and testing under it. Maybe we have to wait for it to exist first.
Having said that, XO should definitely have gone with a "true redhat" version as a backup for sugar.
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
Or, it is as far as I know.
Check out www.squeak.org
It's an Apple and Disney Smalltalk environment that's a lot of fun, and just won't die.
Sugar is a bad idea dreamed up by theorists attached to their ideas of how children should learn, not on any actual observation or testing.
As a concept for a user interface, I like Sugar very much. Read through the HIG documents and you'll see a lot of innovative ideas; if only desktop OSes would do collaboration or file organization or activity scope this way!
As a completed product, Sugar falls short of the mark. It's slow, it's gray, it's bland. It's slow; I wrote it twice because I had the time to do so while waiting for the screen to redraw.
As a teaching tool, where primary-school-age students are ostensibly going to hit the 'View Source' key and edit the internals of their window manager on-the-fly, Sugar is a joke; a solution in search of a problem.
Yes. If your preconceptions prevent you from figuring out what a one or two year old can handle easily, you are retarded and should be put in a home for your own protection as well as for the protection of those around you. You are a danger.
WTF is this OT thread about? Not funny, not insightful. Diabetes happens more often if you are fat.
On topic : You're not going to get many institutions, whoever they are, allowing anyone to run any software off of a USB drive. Honestly, it's just not going to happen, and neither should it. Any institution allowing users to run stuff not centrally ok'd is asking for trouble.
WTF is this OT thread about? Not funny, not insightful. Diabetes happens more often if you are fat.
Correlation is not causation.
The same things that make you fat make you diabetic.
Any institution allowing users to run stuff not centrally ok'd is asking for trouble.
Arguably every institution should just go ahead and burn cycles on encrypting anything sensitive (cpu time is so cheap these days) and just lock things down inside and out to the point where it theoretically doesn't matter if someone plugs something naughty into your network. The simple truth is that it happens very easily, and you might as well assume that it will happen. To be fair, many schools still have tons of older PCs that would take a significant performance hit, and there would be a cost increase somewhere at or near the server end which would be again be prohibitive for similar organizations.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I don't know if brentonboy's post is an allusion to something else, but the post you directly replied to is a (hilarious, IMHO) quote from a recent episode of "30 Rock".
just look at Google. Oh, wait...