Sugar - The Story so Far

On February 5th, a co-worker found his car impounded from the streets of D.C. due to the expiration of his parking meter. With a TomTom GPS and my hybrid, I leapt into super-hero mode and put myself at his disposal for the next several hours. I drove him to the office where he had to bail out his car, then stayed in the car (and in the street until a parking meter opened up) on a cold but quite sunny day. I turned the car stereo to some jazz while pulling up news on my BlackBerry.

I went to Slashdot and got immersed in an article about Sugar Labs [http://news.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/02/05/1813246]. I loved Nicholas Negroponte's editorials in Wired magazine, and was intrigued to learn that he had helped fund the magazine's start. When "Being Digital" was released, I was an enthusiastic fan and especially loved the audiobook, read by Penn Jillette. However, I was not especially surprised to learn that Negroponte had disagreements with the two members of Sugar Labs working on the $100 Laptop Project [http://laptop.org/en/].

The idea of "Sugar on a Stick" [http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_on_a_Stick] appealed to me. This may seem surprising in that I have always been wary of partioning my hard drives into multiple operating systems, and have never successfully installed a Linux environment (partition or otherwise) on a machine. But, booting a flash drive? Very cool. I did study education in college and have several friends attempting to support the education needs of kids from pre-school to middle school; I also do some volunteer work for an educational charity. I decided I would see to what extent Sugar's education tools might have some value for one or more of my teacher friends.

It took a couple of days for me to find time to create a "Sugar on a Stick." Then came another small delay - my eMachine laptop is not USB-stick-literate. I spent a bit of time playing around and looking for guidance on how to remediate this issue; none of the solutions looked especially robust.

A week later, wandering around Target, I caught site of the eee notepad computer - just $300. Obviously, THIS would be new enough to support the requirement, and it would also serve me by providing a light resource for writing without jabbing a pointer at an on-screen keyboard (as my Palm requires). I had tried writing with the keyboard that pulls out of my cell phone but - surprise - the files created this way don't seem to be transferable, in much the same way as the thing won't allow me to convert a sequence from an MP3 file into a ring tone (although I can buy one, and then pay for both the music file and the download).

So - ready to invest in the eee, I open up the day's mailed Micro Center ad and discover that for the same $299.99 I am ready to invest in the eee, I can get 120GB of hard drive rather than 8GB of flash memory to write on, a less plastic-toy-like case and so forth. I send an email to a friend, inviting him to comment whether there is some disadvantage in having the larger set of features with the same weight for the same price. He, logically, ignores the question.

So, this blog is served by a brand-spanking new acer Aspire One and some flash drives. One of them was created according to the instructions at Sugar Labs, except having forgotten to instruct the loader to pick up the Sugar tools, it came out as a bootable Fedora Linux environment. I may blog about my stumbling around with that, but the primary goal of this chronicle is to report on my stumbling around to learn enough about Sugar to share with friends.

Welcome. To you and to your comments. I hope some of these true-life adventures prove entertaining, and perhaps useful to Sugar users and perhaps even Sugar Labs.

Best from your optimistic Unclejack - UnclejackDC@Yahoo.Com