Sugar on a Stick/Quandong

Sugar on a Stick - Quandong

 * a Sugar environment you can carry in your pocket

What's new in Quandong
Sugar version 0.96.1 The most recent release of the Sugar Learning Platform features more activities with new toolbars, activity duplication features, view source for the Sugar toolkit, and improved support for booting on Intel-based Apple computers.

More information about the 0.96.1 release of Sugar is available at 0.96/Notes and Fedora 17 Release Notes.
 * If installing to hard disk or USB drive with liveinst, look at Fedora 17 Common Bugs.

SoaS Release Announcement: 05 June 2012
Release Announcement by Peter Robinson:

There's been a lot of work go into this release from a lot of communities from Fedora and all the Fedora 17 features that give us new and exciting hardware support to the Sugar Labs community and all the new features that come with the Sugar 0.96 release on which SoaS v7 is based.

Thanks go to all the people that have contributed to this release including Kalpa and Thomas who helped directly with SoaS, the Sugar development team and other Sugar developers. A lot of work has been done to ensure we can get working core Activities like Read and Browse and what should a good working base for deployments to test and add to.

Some of the key new features of this release include:
 * - Based on Fedora 17 and it's new features [1]
 * - Massively improved x86 Mac support [2]
 * - Sugar 0.96 with initial support for GTK3 Activities and many other improvements [3]
 * - Return of Browse, now based on WebKit
 * - The long awaited return of Read and inclusion of GetBooks
 * - Enhanced hardware support with the 3.3 kernel
 * - An increase in default Activities by nearly 50%

Almost all of the previous Activities have seen updated releases including but not limited to: - Abacus 35 (GTK3) - Record 95 - Physics 9 - TurtleArt 138

Newly added Activities include: - Browse 137 (GTK3) - Countries 33 - Finance 7 - GetBooks 11 - Help 14 (GTK3) - Infoslicer 14 - Labyrinth 12 - Paint 43 - Portfolio 21 - Read 99 (GTK3)

There are many more Activities available through the usual Fedora repositories.

The release name, Quandong, continues the tradition of naming releases by types of fruit. The Quandong [4] or Native Peach is a native Australian bushfood.

You can download the release from the following link.

http://spins.fedoraproject.org/soas/

It can also be installed as part of a standard Fedora 17 install and is shipped as part of the official Fedora installer DVD and the Fedora Multi Spin Live DVD. It can also be installed from the GUI package tool within a running Fedora install or by command line "sudo yum install @sugar-desktop".
 * [1] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/17/FeatureList
 * [2] http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/12037.html
 * [3] 0.96/Notes
 * [4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santalum_acuminatum

Customize your own remix of Sugar on a Stick.
We realize that we'll never be able to create an Activity selection suitable for all deployments. Quandong now includes a set of teacher-tested Activities in the default image. The following links point the way to building alternative customizations.
 * 1) Build Your Own Remix with Fedora
 * 2) customization guide
 * 3) Sugar on a Stick/Sugar Clone A quick, but less pristine, method of build customization
 * 4) ASLO Activity Collection DVD full of ASLO xo activities to Drag Drop into Soas Journal from DVD for Individual customizations.

Sugar on a Stick is a Fedora Spin. Sugar on a Stick is recognized by the Fedora Project as an official Spin. These close ties with Fedora's release cycle and resources from their engineering and marketing teams extends the reach of Sugar on a Stick and makes the project itself more sustainable. In exchange, users of Fedora have access to an easily deployable implementation of the Sugar Platform; it's a great example of a mutually beneficial upstream–downstream relationship.

Contributing to Sugar on a Stick
The team recognizes the need to continue to improve its release processes and engineering sustainability. New contributors are urged to get involved and help us move towards our long-term vision of bringing stability and deployability to Sugar's personalized learning environment.

If you'd like to contribute to the next version, due for release in December of 2012, please join our mailing list, review Sugar on a Stick, and visit Sugar on a Stick/Beta. All types of contributions are welcome, from the technical to the pedagogical, and we're happy to teach what we know and learn what you have to share.

Thank you to all the people involved for their awesome work!

Release history
To better understand release history, previous release notes can be found here,

and further information on previous releases may be found here: Sugar on a Stick/Project sitemap

QA
Much thanks to Peter Robinson who did a majority of the work to program, prepare and coordinate the work with many other sugar developers for this release.
 * Thomas Gilliard did field-testing (building real SoaS sticks from .iso files and testing on those) - it's the closest thing to systematic testing we've had yet, though we still have a ways to go.
 * Thank you also to James Cameron in Australia for his testing help!
 * Much help was also provided by the team at #fedora-qa; freenode IRC

Documentation
A new release of documentation should come out with each new release of SoaS (although resources have prevented this).

The Fedora-site documentation may not be an improvement over our Sugar Labs, ad hoc wiki documentation methods, as the tools needed to participate are more complicated, and the Spin page documentation is not open to editing. The Fedora Sugar on a Stick pages have not been edited since Mirabelle was released in May 2010.

The attempt to better support a small number of known, working, "how to set up SoaS", instructions has not yet been fulfilled.

Press coverage
Feel free to add links to press coverage you find about Quandong to this section.