Luke Faraone

Sugar on a Stick (SoaS) is a great product in development at Sugar Labs which enables children to take the Sugar Learning Environment with them wherever they go. SoaS suffers from deployment issues in some use cases, namely that it can be difficult to manage a school full of them; the maintenance from having to update Sugar, back it all up, etcetera easily becomes an IT person’s nightmare.

I’m working on a series of projects to make the use of SoaS inside the school itself easier from a setup perspective, as well as solving the management problems I mentioned earlier. This solution comes in a few components:

• SoaS-helper – modified Fedora OS which runs on the school lab computers. When booted, it prompts the user to plug in a USB key containing their SoaS USB stick (which will work with *any* stick that has the proper files). After detection, it will set the user’s home directory to the loopmounted partition and start the Sugar environment as well as update the SoaS installation to the latest image. May also be extended to create USB sticks, or also allow local profiles to be created for users without sticks.
• SoaS-admin – system by which the SoaS-helper machines themselves are updated. Keeps a registry of all sugar sticks. (Key escrow maybe?)
• SoaS-emu – provides a GUI installer for SoaS’s appliance as well as for the SoaS-helper. This will install VirtualBox and configure it for Sugar, making Sugar very easy to demo in schools and at roadshows.

These are all currently in the planning stage, but expect an alpha of some of the components in a bit.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 2nd, 2009 at 16:47 and is filed under Uncategorized and tagged appliance, classroom, soas, sugar. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.