Archive/Current Events/2009-10-12

Sugar Digest
1. While the decision panel debates whether or not Sugar Labs should be a GNU/Linux distributor, I thought it would be worthwhile surveying the GNU/Linux distribution's plans regarding Sugar Release 0.84.


 * Alexsey Lim has been using jhconvert to maintain "official" repositories for a number of distributions, e.g., 0.86 was packaged for Mandriva's development repository and will be in the next release, 2010.0, scheduled for 2009-11-03. Alexsey has compiled a table of the various packaging efforts.
 * David Van Assche has been relying on jhconvert for openSUSE rpms as well.
 * Peter Robinson reports that 0.86 is already in rawhide and hence will be in the soon to be released Fedora 12 beta.
 * Jonas Smedegaard reports that the plan for Debian is to maintain: (a) the newest upstream branch (currently 0.86); (b) newest stable branch (currently 0.84; soon to be 0.86); and possibly (c) additional older stable releases. "In other words, the plan is to track at least head of development and head of stable. And to leave a trail behind of all stable releases for others to spawn off from if they so choose."
 * Rubén Rodríguez Pérez has 0.86 running on Trisquel (See Trisquel-Sugar).

All of these distributions come with the core (Fructose) activities; some, such as openSUSE, come with many additional (Honey) activities pre-packaged. Activities.sugarlabs.org (ASLO, our Activity Library) can be used by all distributions to add 100s of additional activities. The updater in the Sugar Control Panel will automatically update the activities installed on your distribution to the latest versions.

2. Sdenka Salas, a teacher who is working with Andean children from Aymara and Quechua communities, wrote a book in April about using Sugar in the classroom. She recently completed the English-language version. She has kindly made it available for download (See The XO Laptop in the Classroom).

3. Kludge of the week: I was recently asked for a copy of one of my talks. I give all of my talks using the presentation features of Turtle Art and I still haven't gotten around to writing the export function from Turtle Art to .odp (Open Office presentation). For this particular request, I didn't think that the HTML exported from Turtle Art was adequate. So I wrote a one-line Python call to save screen shots into the Journal, loaded it into the Turtle Art "programmable brick", and then added that brick to the "next slide" trigger. The result: a copy of each slide of my talk automatically saved to the Journal. You can see the results in the wiki.

In the Community
4. There is a nice write up of the recent Sugar Day in Argentina (See Reunion Septiembre 2009).

Sugar Labs
5. Gary Martin has generated a SOM from the past week of discussion on the IAEP mailing list (Please see SOM).