Tracking Bug for Mac related Issue

[CarolineM]

This is to support the Gardner Pilot Academy Pilot. GPA

All teachers in the Boston Public Schools were given macbooks last year.

Next year we will do a pilot of Sugar on a Stick for the students of GPA.

We think the easiest thing for the teachers is to run Sugar inside OSX on their Macs, feeling as much as possible like any other application.

We want to do a first demo/training soon at the GPA. In preparation for that we'd like to make it easy for the teachers to install Sugar on their Macs. Ideally, download and click a couple of times and you are there.

I know we are close and that it basically works. I'm looking for someone to help me take it the rest of the way to easy and always works.

[mungewell]

A 'Free' solution?

I have been experimenting using QEMU to run a SOAS variant direct from the file system within windows, the same technique might work for MAC as well (I don't have access to a MAC to test it though....)

The scheme uses a application EEE (​http://www.erikveen.dds.nl/eee/index.html) to wrap both QEMU binaries and startup batch file into a single exe which will decompress to temp directory and run from there.

The batch file calls QEMU from the 'current directory' which is shared as the root drive.

EEE is Free Pascal based, which I believe is available for MAC, as is QEMU.

I have put exe and source here:
​http://www.mungewell.org/sugar-emulator/

There are two problems:
1) Network connectivity, the guest OS (Sugar) can see the internet but local network can not see guest OS. This may effect how collaboration might work.

2) The guest OS image must be smaller than 502MBytes, as the QEMU fat technique only uses FAT16 with 8K sectors.

Cheers,
Mungewell.

[mungewell]

Is there a reason why a commerical virtual machine solution couldn't be used?

[daveb]

I have created a VirtualBox version of this. The install is still a pain, you need to install VirutalBox and then download a disk image then create a new VM with that image.

Collaboartion works.

Documented the process here http://sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_on_a_Stick_VirtualBox

Looking into EEE which might be good to package it all up.

QEMU has a GUI version called "Q" that does not have acceleration for OS X and is very slow. Otherwise it does work.

[brian]

Bert Freudenberg created an image for VMWare Fusion that works incredibly well. Fusion has a free 30 day trial.

​http://croquetweak.blogspot.com/2008/12/emulating-latest-stable-olpc-xo.html
​http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/devel/2008-December/021483.html

[wadeb]

Can we standardize on an emulator technology? There are currently VMWare, QEMU and VirtualBox images linked from the Wiki.

Also, is there a build stream for SoaS images, like the OLPC Joyride stream? If so, it would be nice to have VM images in our chosen format generated automatically for each release.

[garycmartin]

Do we know the predominance of macs they have? I'm thinking Intel vs. PPC is the elephant in the room here. I have a 1.5Ghz ppc laptop, but have never had a useful experience trying to run an emulated sugar (slooooooowwwwww).

[tomeu]

Replying to garycmartin:

Do we know the predominance of macs they have? I'm thinking Intel vs. PPC is the elephant in the room here. I have a 1.5Ghz ppc laptop, but have never had a useful experience trying to run an emulated sugar (slooooooowwwwww).

Wonder if building a ppc soas image is something worth considering.

[wadeb]

Focusing on the emulator discussion (which means Intel only atm), I think we need to standardize on a *single* supported emulator and package ready-to-go SoaS images.

It should not be VirtualBox or QEMU. QEMU has almost no Mac support, and VirtualBox is very limited:
​http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2009/01/a-quick-look-at-virtualbox-21.ars

That leaves VMWare as the only workable emulator solution that covers Mac, Windows and Linux. VMWare offers free tools for creating standalone VM images.

So, can we agree to standardize our emulator efforts on VMWare?

[CarolineM]

Hi,

The teachers in Boston all have macbooks bought in the last 2 years. So these would all be macbooks right?

The schools have a good smattering of old green macs in the classrooms (I'm betting these are ppc).

My client needs are: A VERY VERY easy mac emulation for the teachers. Download it, drag it to your applications folder. THIS IS A BLOCKER for the Sugar on a Stick pilot right now. Teachers will not use sticks. They will use their existing laptops.

I have a lower priority need for a "boot helper" for the old macs that would let students use their sticks. This is a nice to have as it lets us reuse old existing equipment.

I know from a technical point of view we need to standardize. But perhaps we should have a solution that meets our business needs first, then decide if we can improve it, then standardize.

[mick]

I looked at using Q [kju:] -- only because I know it well, I've used it a while ago and i know it is easy.

The pros:

• it is easy to use
• i think that this isn't that difficult to do using Q
• I've been able to compile and run it from source
• the UI would be easy to even modify and make it easier to use, ex: adding a "start" or something so they know where to click.

The cons:

• it is really old. it hasn't been maintained in a year
• qemu guys will tell you not to use it (they recommend vbox)
• it will be slow

I grabbed an svn snapshot of vbox. Here are some pros and cons:

Pros:

• will be faster

Cons:

• I have been having build issues on my macbook :(

So for now, I think I'm going to use the latest svn snapshot of Q. We can move this over to vbox if it is unusable.

• Mick

[FGrose]

Replying to wadeb:

​http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2009/01/a-quick-look-at-virtualbox-21.ars

This negative review has a lot of positive comments that are informative, ​http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2009/01/a-quick-look-at-virtualbox-21.ars#comments, and suggest a closer look, especially for Windows and Linux hosts.

I've been using both Vista32 and Ibex32 hosts for VirtualBox 2.1.2 quite successfully with SoaS. They are a lot less heavy weight compared to the VMWare I was running in Vista32.

I would recommend that VirtualBox be seriously considered for Windows and Linux hosts and monitored further for OS X hosts.

See ​http://schools.sugarlabs.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=27 for recent efforts, and http://sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_on_a_Stick_VirtualBox for a wiki page.

[FGrose]

VirtualBox 2.1.4 has just been released (16 February 2009), ​http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads.

[mick]

I'm assigning back to Dave. I used Q [kju] and it worked, but the problem was that it was really too slow. It took something like 15 minutes to boot. I talked about it a few days ago on irc.

I spoke w/ Caroline and I found out that all of the teachers have Parallels installed anyhow -- so it just makes sense that they get an image distributed that is built for Parallels.

I know it isn't FOSS, but we are in a time crunch and it just makes sense at this point. For this case, it will work.

• Mick

[mick]

As for "what virtualization software to support" -> use virtualbox. The requirement that i had w/ this task was to have one installer (so it had to do with repackaging the software+guest os) -- and not specifically what was the best choice for overall virtual machine software. I've use SoaS on vbox and it is really fast. I've had others confirm this.

[wadeb]

Okay, if VirtualBox is working well enough on Mac, let's standardize on it. Even if it is rough around the edges now, it at least seems that Sun is actively developing it.

Rather than relying on teachers to install VirtualBox, why don't we create a virtual appliance? Then they can just download one file and have Sugar running in a window with a minimum of technical work.

​http://wikis.sun.com/display/Appliance/Introduction+to+Virtual+Appliances

The building of these virtual appliances can be part of the standard SoaS build system (the one which currently produces XO images, .ISOs, etc.).

[daveb]

Unfortunately, that link discusses the concept of Virtual Appliances, where the virtual machine and the environment to run it are combined, it doesn't actually discuss how to do that, or if it is possible with virtualbox.

It sounds like the best option, if it is possible, and we can find out how to accomplish it.

[daveb]

It looks like we could do something like this
1) Have teachers download/install virtualbox
2) package up the VDI image plus some scripts of some sort that call VBoxManage command line to add the VDI and create a new VM, and create some sort of icon to launch sugar inside the VM.

[daveb]

Here is some documentation for building an automated install that allows scripts to run.
​http://developer.apple.com/documentation/DeveloperTools/Conceptual/SoftwareDistribution/Introduction/chapter_1_section_1.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/10000145i-CH1-DontLinkElementID_69

[wadeb]

Sounds like a good idea. There might be an open source graphical installer programs out there that would provide a nice interface.

Perhaps we could even include VirtualBox in the installer to make it a one step download and install?

​http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_installation_software

For the OLPC for Windows istaller, I used the open source NSIS package and embedded QEMU and a disk image into the file. But that's a Windows specific option obviously.

-Wade

[daveb]

It looks like apple provides the installer. I don't think we can distribute virtualbox, but I did not read the license closely.

[daveb]

Actually that's not right since Ubuntu etc distribute Virtualbox-ose. We CAN distribute the open source bits of virtualbox, but its not clear we can distribute the OS X binary install.

[lfaraone]

Replying to daveb:

Actually that's not right since Ubuntu etc distribute Virtualbox-ose. We CAN distribute the open source bits of virtualbox, but its not clear we can distribute the OS X binary install.

See ​http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Licensing_FAQ. We cannot distribute the PUEL'd version, but we can distribute a script which as part of its execution downloads and configures the software.

[sascha_silbe]

Bulk change distribution=SoaS -> component=SoaS

[sdz]

I'm making this a tracking bug for Mac related issues (and will mark related tickets as duplicates). Issues collected here include sound troubles (#804) and webcam issues (#1010).

[FGrose]

This page, ​http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_on_a_Stick/Mac, has be updated recently by User:Interested. (There are some notes left in the wiki source <!-- comments -->.)

[sdz]

Peter says most of the issues should be fixed with the 64bit compose that's going to happen with Mirabelle. At least the boot ones seem (according to two upstream RHBZ entries) related to 64bit EFI stuff newer Macs are using, I hear.

[sdz]

Replying to FGrose:

This page, ​http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_on_a_Stick/Mac, has be updated recently by User:Interested. (There are some notes left in the wiki source <!-- comments -->.)

This page looks now... whoa! :)

[sdz]

Can somebody please test Mirabelle on a Mac?

[dnarvaez]

Closing really old Soas bugs.

[dnarvaez]

Milestone Future deleted