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mu-editor / mu

A small, simple editor for beginner Python programmers. Written in Python and Qt5.
http://codewith.mu
GNU General Public License v3.0
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Chromebook support #593

Open askvictor opened 6 years ago

askvictor commented 6 years ago

OK - definitely in the long-term category. But given how many schools are using chromebooks, think about how many students are potentially missing out on mu :)

A few possible approaches, in (IMHO) decreasing order of feasibility:

askvictor commented 6 years ago

On further investigation, it looks like it shouldn't be to hard to get running using the first approach (Crostini is the internal name for the linux container system). I'll be able to get my hands on a compatible chromebook soon so will have a play at getting it running. At this stage, I think USB support is non-existent, but that's being worked on. How this will look in an educational setting is still pretty fuzzy - I don't think there will be any enterprise-level controls for this for a while yet, and distribution will need to be considered (i.e. distribute an entire container, or just a deb)

ZanderBrown commented 6 years ago

Mu is a Python project so creating a creating an Android app would probably be complex and IIRC QWidgets isn't supported on Android and it would be a lot of work to rebuild in QtQuick which would probably require us to use PySide not PyQt (?)

WebAssembly is awesome but in one sense seems a little overkill and we would have to rebuild Qt + QScientilla + Python in WASM & somehow run Mu on top of that which seems like a lot of work (and I imagine the end result would be quite fragile)

Targeting the Linux support seems the best and should already work but would require the pip based install (at least until Mu is packaged in Debian and things trickle through), I believe Google is considering Flatpak support which should be doable (I've played with that in the past) and school friendly

askvictor commented 6 years ago

I've successfully got mu running on a chromebook under crostini (after first having to install pip, then sorting out a dependency problem as per https://github.com/mu-editor/mu/issues/502). It would certainly be nicer to be able to install it more easily, but I think its a matter of waiting and seeing how Google implement enterprise management for crostini, as this will be the main way mu would be deployed in schools using chromebooks - once we know that, then package it up in an appropriate way.

micro:bit doesn't work yet as there is no access to the USB system from crostini, though if it were possible to download the .hex (as python.microbit.org does) then it's possible to drag this across to the microbit (from the linux filesystem to the USB device) using the stock chromeOS file manager.

electronstudio commented 5 years ago

Would this crostini method work on an ARM chromebook, or just Intel?

askvictor commented 5 years ago

No reason it shouldn't; mu is written in python so there's nothing architecture specific. Some of the dependencies might be a little trickier, but should still work. I think I got it running on a Lenovo n23 a couple of months ago but can't remember (I had some problems getting crostini running reliably on the device, and can't remember how far I got)

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Would this crostini method work on an ARM chromebook, or just Intel?

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carlosperate commented 5 years ago

The main area that could be problematic is getting PyQt5 running on that platform. If crostini allows you to use Linux with a debian base then you should be able to install those dependencies using apt, the steps should be very similar to the Raspberry Pi instructions.

electronstudio commented 5 years ago

It's an Acer R13 belonging to a student, which supposedly supports Crostini in stable channel, but in practice the student got some error and couldn't even get Crostini to install. I will try it myself next time I see them.

askvictor commented 5 years ago

I've just noticed that the requirements.txt (https://github.com/mu-editor/mu/blob/master/requirements.txt) includes the following line: qscintilla; "arm" not in platform_machine along with some more similar. Does this mean that qscintilla is not a requirement for when installing on an ARM device, and it needs to be installed seperately?

carlosperate commented 5 years ago

Yes in that it needs to be installed separately, but it is still a requirement, just not one that can be installed in ARM platforms via PyPi. That's why the Raspberry Pi instructions ask to create a virtual environment with the --system-site-packages flag. https://mu.readthedocs.io/en/latest/setup.html#raspberry-pi