Well here I am at 6:15am writing a post about my night of fun. It started out simple enough. I was just going to continue where I left off after building the project in Ubuntu. I was going to run it, see how SugarLabs looked, try and find the source code, etc. I decided, however, that running a VM inside of Windows 7 to run Ubuntu, then building a whole OS (SugarLabs) and running that inside of Ubuntu was just a little too much abstraction and my poor 3gb laptop was struggling to say the least. So Tan suggested that I just install Mint alongside Windows 7 and go from there, which I thought was a good idea. Well, hours later, after battling with my boot options trying to figure out why my computer refused to boot from any usb device, I had to break down and go to wal-mart and buy some blank discs. At about 3am I had finally finished burning an install disc and it worked like a charm. So I finish installing Mint and do all the things that I had done in Ubuntu to download Sugar and build it. Yay, success!
Running Sugar is interesting, the mouse pointer is gigantic and the buttons are massive as well, but it is surprisingly smooth and modern, for a kids OS. When you move the pointer to any of the screen corners, it brings up borders with options, just like a Mac does - pretty nifty. The navigation and interface of SugarLabs, though, could really use some more focus on design - it's not very intuitive, and things aren't given very meaningful names. For example, I could not find the list of Activities (SugarLabs version of programs, or apps) anywhere because they were ended up being in a directory called "Pippy" with a big snake icon. I guess that's kind of fun and interesting for kids, but man is it confusing.
Thank god for my teammates on this one, Tan was well ahead of us finding the code, etc, and Andrew was able to put together a very good looking deliverable, and although I wish I had been able to get some sleep, the night was not wasted as I learned a lot, got even more acclimated to linux and the command line, and was able to play around in our target project a little, and as a result, I feel a lot more prepared for our future endeavors.
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