Archive/Current Events/2010-04-07

Sugar Digest
1. Simon Schampijer and the Sugar release team announced Sucrose 0.88 last night. This is the fourth Sugar release since we launched Sugar Labs last year. Beyond the significance of the numerous improvements made to Sugar over the past six months is the professionalism of the release team. They have a predictable process; this means that deployments can reliably anticipate how Sugar will be able to meet their needs. Also significant is the degree to which deployments participated in this release. Most of the feature requests and many of the patches came from the field. This is a healthy sign, both in terms of Sugar's long-term sustainability and relevance.

You can read about Sucrose 0.88 in the extensive notes compiled by Simon and the team. (Note that many of the 0.88 features have been backported to Sugar 0.84, the version of Sugar initially being deployed on the OLPC XO 1.5 machines.)

Many thanks to the Sugar community.

2. There has been a heated debate regarding the inclusion of Adobe Flash support on the laptop.org developer list that the Sugar community may find interesting. Please see these threads [1] and [2] as well as a post from Chris Ball from a previous instantiation of the debate in 2009).

In the community
3. I gave the keynote this past weekend at a Hult International Business School Case Study event. They held a contest for proposals regarding the future of One Laptop per Child. I got to play the role of historian and also had the opportunity to plant a seed regarding a future study of Sugar Labs.

4. The DC Learning Club held a sprint this past weekend in order to update the getting started guide on the laptop.org website. When they "push" their changes, they will have updated much of the Sugar material on the site.

5. Rita Freudenberg announced that the University of North Carolina Wilmington will be the host for this year's USA Squeakfest! You are invited to a face-to-face gathering, sharing of experiences and materials relative to the usage of Etoys, July 26, 27 and 28th.

Help wanted
6. 2010 Google Summer of Code intern candidates are beginning to circulate proposals. Please give them feedback.

Tech talk
7. Thomas C Gilliard has built a first pass Sugar Creation kit as a DVD iso image. The idea is to have a DVD that can be used to create Sugar on a Stick USB keys and to install Sugar onto your computer's hard drive. The image (which is quite large) can be found at [3].

8. Paraguay Educa technology team has released a Sugar/F11 image for field testing in their Caacupé pilot: os115.img,os115.crc, os115.img.fs.zip.

The image is "a derivative of Stephen Parrish's excellent F11-XO1 series, frozen a few weeks ago to concentrate on stability and field testing." The team's short-term goal is to meet a release criteria of "no regressions against build 801". Once this is done, they plan to synchronize with the latest improvements from our upstreams, F11-XO1.5 and F11-XO1.

Sugar Labs
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