Archive/Current Events/2010-03-22

Sugar Digest
1. Simon Schampijer announced that our 0.88 Release Candidate is ready for testing. We are in "Code Freeze", only critical bug fixes can be landed now. Any testing would be greatly appreciated. You can access the latest bits for testing using sugar-jhbuild (update and build) or downloading a Sugar-on-a-Stick image from http://alt.fedoraproject.org/pub/alt/nightly-composes/soas/. There is also a Karmic-based ppa for use on Ubuntu (See Karmac-Sucrose-0.88-ppa).

Simon has begun pulling together release notes (See 0.88/Notes).

Many thanks to Simon, our release manager, and the many community members who have contributed to this release, including Sascha Silbe and Aleksey Lim, both of whom have been relentless in closing tickets.

It is worth noting that many of the new features and "under-the-hood" improvements in this release have come from "local lab" efforts. For example, teams in Uruguay and Paraguay have led much of the development efforts. This is due in large part to the steadfastness of Tomeu Vizoso and Bernie Innocenti, both of whom have been working hard to help local efforts better integrate with the Sugar upstream project. This highly distributed model, where problems are identified on the ground and largely addressed locally, but then integrated with the upstream project is a powerful and sustainable model for Sugar.

2. Tim McNamara, our Google Summer of Code coordinator has been hard at work. He has submitted our application and is now busy with the recruitment process. You can learn more about how you might participate in this year's program by visiting Summer_of_Code. Please help spread the word to potential candidates.

3. Josh Williams has been working on a new skin for our wiki. See http://wiki-devel.sugarlabs.org/ to get a sense of where he is heading. The new theme is simple, clean, and more in keeping with the Sugar style used on our other sites.

In the community
4. LIBREPLANET begins on Friday, 19 March. You can learn more about these three days of Free Software activism at http://groups.fsf.org/wiki/LibrePlanet2010. (I'll be participating in the program on Saturday.)

5. Ken Haase, a former colleague of mine at MIT, has been working on a new ebook reader that may be of interest to the Sugar community. You can play with it by visiting http://sbooks.net. It is built in Javascript and it has offline reading capabilities as well, which, with Lucian Branescu's patches to Browse (which hopefully will land in Release 0.90), it might make a very interesting Sugar activity. Ken is also developing a site for having children add metadata to ebooks (See http://beebooks.org for more details).

Help wanted
6. We are now advertising some "new easy to fix tickets" on http://bugs.sugarlabs.org/ for anyone looking for an introductory Sugar-related programming project. (Developers, you can use the tag "sugar-love" to get tickets added to the list.

7. Bernie and Stefan Unterhauser (dogi) have asked if anyone would be willing to step forward to take over maintenance of any of the following:
 * http://planet.sugarlabs.org/ (and switch it to Planet Venus!)
 * http://git.sugarlabs.org/ (major upgrade needed!)
 * http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/ (not a lot of work)
 * http://www.sugarlabs.org/ (major revamp needed, maybe with Drupal)

Tech talk
8. Bert Freudenberg has been working on Sugar-Journal integration of Scratch.

9. Matt Gallagher has been working on Gnome-desktop integration of Turtle Art.