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OLPC Fork Sugar On a Stick Goes 1.0
Marten writes "It was more than a year ago that Walter Bender left OLPC and started SugarLabs.org. Now, the first version of the new project has been released. Sugar on a Stick is a USB drive that runs on Mac and PC-style hardware. 'The open-source education software developed for the "$100 laptop" can now be loaded onto a $5 USB stick to give aging PCs and Macs a new interface and custom educational software.' Bender said, 'What we are doing is taking a bunch of old machines that barely run Windows 2000, and turning them into something interesting and useful for essentially zero cost. It becomes a whole new computer running off the USB key; we can breathe new life into millions of decrepit old machines.'"
None of of my old computers that were from the Win 95/98/2000 era have the option to boot from USB. Is there going to be other media available?
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What we are doing is taking a bunch of old machines that barely run Windows 2000, and turning them into something interesting and useful for essentially zero cost. It becomes a whole new computer running off the USB key; we can breathe new life into millions of decrepit old machines
The problem with that is that a lot of computers that old don't support booting off of a USB drive. Plus, some of the computers might only have USB 1.1 leading to slower transfer times. If this is your goal why not try to have it be "sugar on a disk" thats going to be infinitely easier than "sugar on a stick".
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by the time they're done with school, it won't matter what OS they used, they will have all changed so drastically. We had an Apple II in my classroom as a child, which OS would you say it prepared me for?
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I don't think the goal of that project is to teach an OS. Instead it is very good to learn the computer science and to have access to very good tools and software. In my mind, I think that using only one OS is very bad. Try multiple OS and use the one that fit best your needs. For me, linux is my choice.
Going by the pictures I would keep this away from children:
http://www.sugarlabs.org/index.php?template=page&page=learners
It depends though, what about the kid who uses Windows 95 in kindergarten in 1996, then moves up to using Windows 98 in 1999, uses XP in school in 2002 and Vista in 2007, by 2008 the kid is out of high school. All the while even with later upgrades, the kid never has much of a learning curve, you can even extend it to college where he can continue using Vista till at least graduation time.
Its not the 70s, and its not the 80s, computer UI interfaces are pretty standard, especially among OS families. About the last major change to an OS that totally redesigned it was OS X and that was back in 2002.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Fact1: Kids are not learning any OS. They are learning to navigate a UI and exposing them to multiples enhances critical thinking instead of rote memorization.
Fact2: The OS means nothing, there are near ZERO highschools teaching an OS, and negative 10 grade schools teaching an OS. From your logic, people should be crying in the streets because the iphone is not like windows.
And yes, if the programming classes in highschools did fortran or cobol instead of the abortion that is basic. From my daughters experience her Computer science class at her highschool was a complete and utter joke.
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OLPC is an educational project, not a computer project.
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There is a boot helper CD available, see http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_on_a_Stick/Strawberry under the section "Boot it!"
Most of those Older Pc's cant boot from a USB stick. It's only been the past 3 years that booting from a usb drive has become the norm, before that it was an oddity.
There is a boot helper CD for older computers like this. The beauty is that the OS on the computer is untouched, since Sugar runs from memory not the hard drive. Additionally, all progress is saved to the USB drive, so the stick is portable from computer to computer.
There is a CD spin too, but the USB solution means the kid can do stuff in school, then come home, boot up the old computer and show her parents what she did right off the stick.
...if the old codebase is not maintained: http://dev.laptop.org/git/sugar/
and the original copyright owner switches to the new codebase:
http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/devel/2009-May/024487.html
Correct. OLPC is in fact becoming the new downstream of Sugar, pulling in the new packages in future OLPC distro releases.
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