Archive/Current Events/2011-11-06

Sugar Digest
1. Daniel Drake has announced the second release candidate of the new OLPC 11.3.0 software release, which incorporates the latest Sugar bits. You can download 'signed' images for testing from: XO-1 XO-1.5 XO-1.75

The final release is scheduled for 1 November.

2. OLPC OZ runs a discussion website on yammer.com for teachers working with XOs in Australia. It is a nice source of feedback about Sugar and 1-to-1 laptop deployments in general.

Recently, there was a posting that referenced an OLPC News article about a lemon-battery project by Sameer Verma. There was also a tip of the hat to Guzman Trindad, a teacher in Uruguay, who built a pulse meter. I am not sure how OLPC News missed all of the other great work that Guzman has been doing with Turtle Art and sensors and also the work of Tony Forster, who blogs regularly about various ways to engage children with simple sensors. His most recent posting is about using the accelerometer on the XO 1.75 as a seismograph. Check it out.

3. While Guzman and Tony have been using the built-in sensors and simple sensors plugged into the microphone port of the XO laptop, the Butia team in Uruguay has been augmenting the XO with an Arduino board. The latest video of their work is on YouTube. Be sure to watch past the 'Schwarzenegger' robot to see the XO robot programmed in Turtle Art.

4. A few weeks ago, Team Sugarlabs participated in the Boston Hub on Wheels bicycle tour. Dogi road with an XO attached to his handlebars, but he wasn't running the Turtle Art odometer program.

5. We've passed six-million downloads on ASLO.

In the community
6. The SF Summit is this coming weekend, 21-23 October.

7. The Prague Sugar Camp (Gtk3 Hackfest 2011) is next weekend, 28-30 October.

8. Reminder: As a community member, it is important that your voice be heard. One mechanism is for you to participate in our upcoming election: We will be holding an election for three Sugar Labs oversight board (SLOB) positions at the end of next month. If you are not already a member of Sugar Labs, please send your name and an explanation of your contribution to Sugar Labs in an email to members at sugarlabs dot org. If you are a member, please consider being a candidate for one of the SLOB positions.

Tech Talk
9. Rob Savoye has managed to build Gnash for ARM. He has made RPMs for the XO 1.75 machine. To install his RPMs, add this .repo file to your XO:

[gnash-snapshot] name=Gnash Snapshot for Fedora $releasever baseurl=http://getgnash.org/yum/fedora/$releasever/updates/$basearch/ enabled=1 gpgkey=http://getgnash.org/gnashdev.key

Sugar Labs
Gary Martin has generated a SOM from the past few weeks of discussion on the IAEP mailing list.

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