Hey there,
there's two spins right now that have gone through the mangling[1], and a few other spins that are 'incomplete'[2], or 'ready for wrangler'[3].
The spins that are ready for the SIG will need to be reviewed by the Spins SIG members before the following meeting, Monday Feb. 16th.
Spin maintainers that have not yet completed their spin pages, please do so now ;-)
Kind regards,
Jeroen van Meeuwen -kanarip
[1] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Category:Spins_Ready_For_SIG [2] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Category:Incomplete_Spins [3] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Category:Spins_Ready_For_Wrangler
Jeroen van Meeuwen wrote:
Hey there,
there's two spins right now that have gone through the mangling[1], and a few other spins that are 'incomplete'[2], or 'ready for wrangler'[3].
The spins that are ready for the SIG will need to be reviewed by the Spins SIG members before the following meeting, Monday Feb. 16th.
Spin maintainers that have not yet completed their spin pages, please do so now ;-)
Kind regards,
Jeroen van Meeuwen -kanarip
[1] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Category:Spins_Ready_For_SIG [2] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Category:Incomplete_Spins [3] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Category:Spins_Ready_For_Wrangler
Hi there,
well, as far as I can see, the Education Spin is up for review, since it's in the ready-for-SIG group. But I won't be able to make it for the meeting, again.
That's also why I felt that it might be a good idea to pre-answer some questions, which might arise during that meeting.
* First of all, why are we including two desktop environments, in fact Sugar and Xfce, here?
Well, the goal of the spin is to expose the applications, being available for use in the educational sector. We wanted to provide the best-suited solution for this purpose. By doing so, why're not just pushing the popular KDE Education package, but also the Sugar Desktop Environment, which is gaining more and more importance.
The possibility to switch between these two environments is quite an important point, too. Just imagine a use case, where a teacher wants to show-case the spin to different target groups: An older student (with more technical knowledge) can use Sugar, or, if he wants to get to a "normal" desktop, just fire up Xfce.
* %packages --excludedocs --instLangs en_US
Yeah, that's discussable: The latter argument cleans up /usr/share regarding the selected locales. It might be, that we'd drop this option later, but for now, it's a good possibility for us, to save some space.
We'll also provide some comments (e.g. in the kickstart file) that people, who wanted to create a localized version of this spin, should also adjust this parameter.
If there are any concerns, please drop me an e-mail!
Thanks, --Sebastian
Sebastian Dziallas (sebastian@when.com) said:
The possibility to switch between these two environments is quite an important point, too. Just imagine a use case, where a teacher wants to show-case the spin to different target groups: An older student (with more technical knowledge) can use Sugar, or, if he wants to get to a "normal" desktop, just fire up Xfce.
... that seems a bit of a narrow use case to me, especially for a general deployment. All having both desktops says to me is "we don't have our story straight."
I'm assuming it doesn't cause it not to fit.
Bill
Bill Nottingham wrote:
Sebastian Dziallas (sebastian@when.com) said:
The possibility to switch between these two environments is quite an important point, too. Just imagine a use case, where a teacher wants to show-case the spin to different target groups: An older student (with more technical knowledge) can use Sugar, or, if he wants to get to a "normal" desktop, just fire up Xfce.
... that seems a bit of a narrow use case to me, especially for a general deployment. All having both desktops says to me is "we don't have our story straight."
I'm assuming it doesn't cause it not to fit.
Bill
Well, the thing is that we just cannot provide a fitting solution for complete deployment. Why? Because every school has it's own needs, for which they need to customize that solution.
I'm deploying a modified version in my school, too. But if I tried to push that as the official Education Spin, it would never get through.
So what are we doing instead? We're trying to provide a solution, with which pupils, students, teachers are able to explore the possibilities we can provide them with.
That's our goal. To allow them to see, what's possible. And once they're convinced that they want to have this or that solution, they can still pull the kickstart file and apply some small modifications on their own. And I feel that this is one of the great advantages of the kickstart system...
Regarding the size: Sugar itself isn't really that big and we're sharing most of the dependencies (sugar-write requires libabiword - in Xfce, we're using abiword; sugar-chat requires telepathy, in Xfce, we're using empathy; and so on...), so it's just a few MB.
--Sebastian
Sebastian Dziallas (sebastian@when.com) said:
That's our goal. To allow them to see, what's possible. And once they're convinced that they want to have this or that solution, they can still pull the kickstart file and apply some small modifications on their own. And I feel that this is one of the great advantages of the kickstart system...
... ouch. Maybe I'm underestimating the .edu infrastructure, but it would seem to me that requiring "if you're going to deploy this, you're going to have to do your own custom spin" is going to limit it's usefulness.
Bill
Bill Nottingham wrote:
Sebastian Dziallas (sebastian@when.com) said:
That's our goal. To allow them to see, what's possible. And once they're convinced that they want to have this or that solution, they can still pull the kickstart file and apply some small modifications on their own. And I feel that this is one of the great advantages of the kickstart system...
... ouch. Maybe I'm underestimating the .edu infrastructure, but it would seem to me that requiring "if you're going to deploy this, you're going to have to do your own custom spin" is going to limit it's usefulness.
Most people are going to do their own deployment anyway, I think. Besides that, live media is a show-case, not a deployment method. Regardless, I also think that including the Sugar environment on this spin has to do with dropping the Sugar spin.
Kind regards,
Jeroen van Meeuwen -kanarip
Jeroen van Meeuwen wrote:
Bill Nottingham wrote:
Sebastian Dziallas (sebastian@when.com) said:
That's our goal. To allow them to see, what's possible. And once they're convinced that they want to have this or that solution, they can still pull the kickstart file and apply some small modifications on their own. And I feel that this is one of the great advantages of the kickstart system...
... ouch. Maybe I'm underestimating the .edu infrastructure, but it would seem to me that requiring "if you're going to deploy this, you're going to have to do your own custom spin" is going to limit it's usefulness.
Most people are going to do their own deployment anyway, I think. Besides that, live media is a show-case, not a deployment method. Regardless, I also think that including the Sugar environment on this spin has to do with dropping the Sugar spin.
Kind regards,
Jeroen van Meeuwen -kanarip
I agree here.
We're trying to give the user a show-case, a first-look experience of what we can provide. I'd really love to see a more complete solution, too, but this requires obviously more work and help...
So why are we including Sugar, even though I argued in my last e-mail, that it would be moving quickly? This is now something else: We're not only focused on Sugar and are giving out a solution with which we're intending to show the most important educational apps off. Sure, it has partly to do with dropping the Sugar Spin. Because now, we can provide people with educational tools from two great projects, the KDE Education Project and Sugar Labs at the same time.
By the way, I also uploaded a slightly modified version: http://sdz.fedorapeople.org/kickstart/livecd-education.ks
No big changes, but some comments and updates.
Thanks, --Sebastian
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Bill Nottingham -
Jeroen van Meeuwen -
Sebastian Dziallas