(photo by Puppy Linux)

Walter and Wanda Bender, Amy Bisiewicz and myself visited the computer lab at the Shaw School in Boston to gather more information on how we could provide the Sugar educational platform to students there.

Our testing focused on figuring out what it will take to make Sugar run on the existing Compaq Pentium 4 "EVO" desktops with 256M of DRAM.  Several different distributions were tested and "Puppy Linux" a tiny version of linux had by far the best performance.  Ubuntu and Fedoa would not completely boot.

 Walter's notes are here: http://sugarlabs.org/go/Talk:Supported_systems#LiveCD

Sugar is a User Interface (UI) for Linux that is designed for learning and elementary aged students.  Walter and the Sugar community will be working on porting Sugar to run on top of Puppy Linux.

Other notes: 

• With Amy's help we were able to change the boot order on the machines so they can definitely be set to boot from USB.
• Walter suggested using USB extenders for two reasons.  First, to make it easier to get to the USB ports which are on the back of the machine, and also because frequent connection and disconnection will cause the connectors to wear out and its a lot easeir to replace an extension cord. They only cost a few dollars.
• As previously reported SLAX dies after a while. Walter suggested putting a swap partion on the USB key so it won't run out of memory.