Sugar Labs - User contributions [en]

Archive/Current Events/2008-06-24

2016-12-19T13:37:44Z

KachachanC: Undo revision 99640 by KachachanC (talk)

Archive/Current Events/2008-06-09

2016-12-19T13:37:43Z

KachachanC: Undo revision 99639 by KachachanC (talk)

Archive/Current Events/2008-09-08

2016-12-19T13:37:31Z

KachachanC: Undo revision 99643 by KachachanC (talk)

Archive/Current Events/2008-08-18

2016-12-19T13:37:27Z

KachachanC: Undo revision 99644 by KachachanC (talk)

Archive/Current Events/2008-08-25

2016-12-19T13:34:43Z

KachachanC: Undo revision 99646 by KachachanC (talk)

Archive/Current Events/2008-09-30

2016-12-19T13:34:40Z

KachachanC: Undo revision 99648 by KachachanC (talk)

Archive/Current Events/2008-09-02

2016-12-19T13:34:35Z

KachachanC: Undo revision 99649 by KachachanC (talk)

Archive/Current Events/2008-07-28

2016-12-19T13:34:31Z

KachachanC: Undo revision 99650 by KachachanC (talk)

Archive/Current Events/2008-10-13

2016-12-19T13:34:29Z

KachachanC: Undo revision 99651 by KachachanC (talk)

Archive/Current Events/2008-06-29

2016-12-19T13:34:25Z

KachachanC: Undo revision 99656 by KachachanC (talk)

<noinclude>{{GoogleTrans-en}}</noinclude>

=== Sugar Digest ===

1. Latest Sucrose: The new [[0.82/0.81.3 Notes|Sucrose]] 0.81.3 Development Release is now available. The release has some new features, including: Manual reordering of the Home view icons; a freeform layout of the Home view icons; improved feedback on activity startup; support for custom certificates in Browse; alt+tab activity switching; etc. We are now in feature freeze, so the short-term focus will be on testing, bug triaging and fixes. The community has done a great job in that we achieved practically all the features that we had targeted. Thanks to everyone that made this possible and special kudos to the Sugar release team.

Detailed release notes can be found in the wiki (Please see [[0.82/0.81.3 Notes]]); a sugar-jhbuild branch for the release can be found here (http://dev.laptop.org/git?p=sugar-jhbuild;a=shortlog;h=sucrose-0.81.3).

With the release of 0.81.3 we will be in feature freeze ([[Development Team/Release#Feature_freeze]]): this affects all of the modules included in the release. To request an exception, which will be exceptional, please send mail to sugar at laptop.org, copying release-team at sugarlabs.org; please include the patches you would like to land. For string changes please also copy localization at lists.laptop.org.

2. Making the installation of Activities easier: Dave Farning is working on a web interface to managing activities based upon Mozilla's AMO codebase (addons.mozilla.org). He has successfully used AMO on a local server to install activities on an XO-1 laptop and to install Sugar on a conventional laptop. He has started submitting a series of patches upstream to Mozilla.org with the goal that SugarLabs will be able to use the AMO codebase as maintained by Moxilla. A few areas that require work: (a) Look and feel – applying the sugarlabs stylesheets; (b) Applications – currently, AMO hardcodes application data rather than handled dynamically; (c) Addontypes – AMO can handle several addontypes such as extension, plugins, and and dictionaries, but they are not yet handled dynamically. By modularizing how AMO handles applications and add-on types, we should be able to drop in Sugar application and and addontype code.

The work flow for a developer would be:
* Activity authors register their activity with AMO;
* author uploads latest release into sandbox;
* reviewer verifies new upload works correctly and publishes the upload.

From the user perspective, Activities would then be browseable and downloadable in a manner similar to any Firefox plugin, with very fast, secure, and scalable updates.

Dave is looking for help (the code is being put in https://www.develer.com/gitweb/pub?p=users/dfarning/w.s.o.git;a=summary).

In parallel, there has also been a discussion on the Sugar list regarding development of an activity for updating Sugar and Sugar Activities.

3. courses.sugarlabs.org: David Van Assche is setting up a Moodle installation at http://courses.sugarlabs.org to complement activities.sugarlabs.org. It will house stable versions of activities, together with lesson plans, relevant reading materials, and related activities. The OLE Nepal team, with help from Bernie Innocenti, who is in Kathmandu for the summer, will be fleshing out the site. Please contribute.

4. Usability testing: Carlos Mauro Cárdenas Fernández has begun a pilot usability test of Sugar on the Intel Classmate PC (Please see http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Projects/TestUsabilityOLPC for some details of his plans and initial findings).

=== Community jams and meetups ===

5. Porto Alegre, Brazil: Juliano Bittencourt from Laboratório de Estudos Cognitivos reports that a GameJam was held at FISL 9.0, the largest Latin America free software conference. A short video made during the event is available on YouTube (Please see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oWKBdeZUtq0). A team from the Argentian PyGame group was the winner: a game called Falabranaman.

===Tech Talk===

6. Infrastructure: Marco Pesenti Gritti has started a page on the wiki about infrastructure ([[Infrastructure Team/Roadmap]]) and is seeking your feedback.

7. Journal: Tomeu Vizoso reports that a new version of the Journal activity has been released, with many translation updates and some visual fixes (Download it from http://dev.laptop.org/pub/sugar/sources/journal-activity/journal-activity-92.tar.bz2). New features include:
* Add indications for empty Journal and empty search results (Eben Eliason)
* Translation update for Italian (Carlo Falciola)
* Fix appearance of "no preview" (Eben Eliason)
* Translation update for Khmer (Rit Lim)
* Translation update for Haitian Creole (Diksyone Ayisyen)
* Translation update for German (Markus Schlager)
* Translation update for Marathi (Rupali Sarode)
* Translation update for French (Samy Boutayeb)
* Adapt object chooser to new designs. Some refactoring was needed (Tomeu)
* Adapt UI to right-to-left scripts (Khaled Hosny)

8. Datastore: Tomeu also reports that a new version of the datastore has been released (http://dev.laptop.org/pub/sugar/sources/sugar-datastore/sugar-datastore-0.8.2.tar.bz2). New features include a metadata copy outside the index.

9. USB key boot: The CD-image of the recent XO-LiveCD (Version 080607) contains a script to copy the data on a USB key and make it bootable:
* mount the CD (or ISO-image) on a computer running Linux;
* open a console (shell) and go into the directory tools/;
* insert a usb memory device and
* run the command ./make_usbstick.sh -d <block-device> -m <cd-mount-point>
Hint: ./make_usbstick.sh -h provides more detailed documentation. Please contact Wolfgang Rohrmoser if you have any questions (WolfgangRohrmoser at web.de).

10. Char 41: Morgan Collett has released Chat 41 (Please see http://dev.laptop.org/pub/sugar/sources/chat-activity/Chat-41.tar.bz2 and http://dev.laptop.org/~morgan/bundles/Chat-41.xo). New features include:
* Updated translations: mr, de, ht, km, es, it;
* #6036: Add separator after old chat history;
* #6298: Implement 1-1 private chat with non Sugar Jabber clients.
Morgan also updated the Presence Service with the changes required for non-Sugar Jabber clients to chat with OLPC XO-1 laptops.

11. Fedora 9: Daniel Drake reports that the following packages may make the Fedora-9 build experience a little more bearable:
* a NetworkManager that can actually connect to networks (http://dev.laptop.org/~dsd/NetworkManager-0.6.5-0.11.svn3246.olpc3.i386.rpm);
* fixed keyboard – arrow keys, Alt-Gr and other functionality (http://dev.laptop.org/~dsd/xorg-x11-server-Xorg-1.4.99.901-29.20080415.fc9.i386.rpm)

12. Alt-Tab: Benjamin Berg submitted a number of patches to update Alt-Tab behavior for switching between activities.

13. Measure activity: Arjun Sarwal has been working upon 'Sound' and 'Sensor' contexts within Measure and also, adding a textbox at the bottom that mentions details about the signal/sound input (Please view a screenshot at http://crank.laptop.org/~arjs/sound_sensors.png). Arjun has also been working on a new re-organized wiki page for Measure (Please see http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Measure/New_temp). Suggestions and contributions are very welcome.

14. Home view: Tomeu Visozo has implemented a Home view user interface that allows the user to "drag and drop" activities to desired locations on the screen (freeform) rather than restricting them to the circle. Other activities move nicely out of the way if you try to drop one on top of another.

15. Patches: Marco Pesenti Gritti reviewed patches and more patches. He also packaged xulrunner 1.9 final and adapted the Browse activity to it. Finally he coordinated the Sugar 0.81.3 release and made big progresses on a Fedora 9 based Sugar liveCD. (Note that xulrunner 1.9 final is the version used in Firefox 3, which provides much better memory use than previous versions.)

16. Sugar Almanac: Faisal Anwar of Media Modifications has made progress on an online "Sugar Almanac" of best practices and working code snippets (Please see http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Sugar.activity.activity).

17. Etoys: Bert Freudenberg reports a new etoys release (Please see http://dev.laptop.org/pub/sugar/sources/etoys/etoys-3.0.2029.tar.gz and http://dev.laptop.org/pub/sugar/sources/etoys-activity/etoys-activity-83.tar.gz ; the bundled versions cab be found at http://etoys.laptop.org/rpms/etoys-3.0.2007-1.noarch.rpm and http://etoys.laptop.org/rpms/Etoys-83.xo). Improvements include: Pango fixes (tested with Nepalese), new DBus bindings, updated QuickGuides, a few more strings made translatable.

18. Statistics: ohloh also has some statistics on the Sugar software:
* http://www.ohloh.net/projects/9605/analyses/latest
* http://www.ohloh.net/projects/11601/analyses/latest
* http://www.ohloh.net/projects/sugar-presence-service/analyses/latest
* http://www.ohloh.net/projects/11526/analyses/latest
* http://www.ohloh.net/projects/11636/analyses/latest

=== Sugar Labs ===

19. Self-organizing map (SOM): Gary Martin has generated another SOM from the past week of discussion on the IAEP mailing list (Please see [[:Image:2008-June-14-20-som.jpg]]). The list was relatively quite this week, considering all of the progress, so the map is not very informative – the data being sparse.

[[Category:Sugar Digest]]

Archive/Current Events/2008-07-14

2016-12-19T13:33:46Z

KachachanC: Undo revision 99653 by KachachanC (talk)

Archive/Current Events/2008-10-06

2016-12-19T13:33:43Z

KachachanC: Undo revision 99654 by KachachanC (talk)

Archive/Current Events/2008-10-20

2016-12-19T13:33:41Z

KachachanC: Undo revision 99657 by KachachanC (talk)

Archive/Current Events/2009-01-13

2016-12-19T13:33:36Z

KachachanC: Undo revision 99658 by KachachanC (talk)

Archive/Current Events/2008-11-04

2016-12-19T13:33:34Z

KachachanC: Undo revision 99659 by KachachanC (talk)

<noinclude>{{ GoogleTrans-en | es =show | bg =show | zh-CN =show | zh-TW =show | hr =show | cs =show | da =show | nl =show | fi =show | fr =show | de =show | el =show | hi =show | it =show | ja =show | ko =show | no =show | pl =show | pt =show | ro =show | ru =show | sv =show }}</noinclude>

=== Sugar Digest ===

1. Lima: Sugar was well represented in Peru this past week. Rafael Ortiz and Sebastian Silva organized a translation sprint at the [http://usmp.edu.pe University San Martin de Porres]. SJ Klein and C. Scott Ananian then joined them to run a Game Jam. The week culminated with a Freedom and Open Source Day, in which we were joined by many members of the Peruvian Free Software community, including Nicolas Valcárcel from the Ubuntu community. My talk at the conference was titled “What the learning community can learn from Free Software.” One of my slides made the point that sostenibilidad ≠ sustentabilidad. Both words translate into “sustainability” in English, but Dr. Arq. Guillermo E. Gonzolo from CEEMA in Argentina pointed out the subtle distinction to me—one that I find quite interesting: sostenibilidad is static; sustenabilidad is dynamic. Putting XP on laptops is about maintaining the status quo (sostenibilidad), while Linux, which is at the beginning rather than end of its life cycle is where the true “unlimited potential” can be found (sustenabildad). I'll post my slides on the wiki when I get a chance.

2. What would creating a Sugar Activity require from me and what benefits would it bring?
I was asked this two-part question from a software developer. The Sugar Almanac is a good starting point for answering the first part ([http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Sugar_Almanac Sugar Almanac]). The second part is complex and rather than giving a glib answer, I want to take some time to give it some thought. The obvious answer, the chance to touch the lives of hundreds of thousands of children, is OK, but I think we need to develop more of a case.

3. Deployment roadmap: David Farning is developing a deployment roadmap with the goal to make Sugar and Sugar Activities “freely and readily available to learners everywhere.” Sounds good to me. (See [[Deployment Team/Roadmap|Deployment Roadmap]]).

4. Sugar on a stick: Caroline Meeks has been maintaining a page in the wiki tracking our progress with developing a turnkey USB key solution for schools (See [[Deployment Team/School_Key|School Key]]
).

5. Printing: Printing was hotly debated on the Sugar list ([http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/sugar/2008-October/009403.html Printing]). There were two discussions: Should Sugar support printing and How should Sugar support printing. It seems that there is not consensus on the first question—it isn't clear that there needs to be. (Printing is not a realistic option in the Peru deployment, but that shouldn't preclude its use in other places, necessarily. To me, the most compelling argument in favor of printing that was put forth is it lets you put the work of the students on display.) As to how to do it, there is the question of what affordances we should be providing (in which Activities) and whether or not we should be supporting network printing vs the installation of print drivers. The latter question is more of a distribution question than one for Sugar to resolve.

6. Feedback from Peruvian Ministry of Education: C. Scott Ananian and I made multiple visits to the MEC office in Lima to discuss Sugar 0.82 and the OLPC XO deployment. We got some great feedback, including a healthy list of bugs, one of the most pressing being that audio files are seemingly not importing properly when trying to create a new game in the Memorize Activity. The reason this is important is that Memorize is a nice tool introducing letter and word sounds to new readers. Another bug—or point of confusion—was in regard to how the Record Activity is saved to the Journal. Record sessions and photos created by Record both show up when doing an image search in the Journal. This is fine when in browsing within the Journal itself, but caused confusion when trying to import an image into Write. If you tried to import a session instead of a photo, the import failed.

It was nice to hear that was there was a distinct impression (from the user perspective) that “it is faster!!” In general the new Home View was well received: One simple idea we explored together was the use of the list view “star” option to restrict the number of Activity icons appearing on the Home View. This lets a teacher focus the class on a small set of Activities related to the goals being set for the students. It may be possible to have different collections of Activities tagged in the Journal for easy maintenance of such a scheme.

The pedagogical team at the ministry has been developing some beautiful curricula guides for Sugar. They describe projects that encompass multiple activities towards a common goal, such as creating a newspaper or a story about your community. The guides are targeting different skill levels and they beautifully illustrate pedagogical goals without being overly prescriptive. The multi-page guides are intended for teachers. Single-page instructions are also being created for students. As they complete a few more, they will make them available for downloading.

7. ¿Qué? ¿Cómo? ¿Por qué? ¿Para qui?: We also discussed the role that a portfolio might play in Sugar. What? How? Why? For who? are questions that are part of the teacher/student discourse in Peru. They are also questions that are important to the “select-reflect-perform” cycle of portfolio assessment. Scott, Rafael, Sebastian and I spend quite a bit of time discussion possible approaches to building a Portfolio Activity (we agreed that it makes sense to make it a separate Activity from the Journal for the time being). My hair-brained idea is to make a Turtle-Art-like snap-together programing Activity to create narrative presentations from items selected from the Journal. I'll make some sketches in the coming days and post them to the wiki. The team at the ministry was very upbeat about portfolio tools, regardless of the implementation details.

8. Thin and fat clients: Brendan R. Powers from [http://www.resara.com Resara] has taken an interest in Sugar. Resara deploys Linux desktop solutions in schools in the United States. Brendon believes that Sugar's collaboration tools, Journal and other features “could be very appealing to younger grade (elementary and middle school) students and teachers.” We'll be exploring how to use Sugar on some of the classrooms already on their thin client desktops.

9. On collaboration: Juliano Bittencourt has stirred the pot regard the Sugar collaboration model. In a discussion on the developers mailing list ([http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/devel/2008-October/020588.html On collaboration]) he raises the issue of synchronous vs asynchronous collaboration, arguing that too much emphasis has been given over to the former, when the latter is generally more useful in a school setting. I agree with him to a great extent. There are not too many learning scenarios that I am aware of where a tightly coupled synchronous interaction is critical. Exceptions of course include Chat—which can be used as a group storytelling medium and an medium through which other collaborations are staged and organized—and include some of the activities around real-time picture sharing and other data-gathering exercises, such as the use of Measure or Distance. Etoys also has a number synchronous modes that are rich, including the ability to share both objects and a workspace. The peer-to-peer editing in the Write Activity may not require synchrony: children could trade documents, edit, and then pass them back. But the feature has been used creatively for other narrative purposes. And of course, there are lots of great games that require some level of synchrony, so the effort that has gone into this layer of the infrastructure will continue to be of value.

To some extent, Juliano's point was less in regard to synchrony and more in regard to the lack of any means within Sugar to maintain persistence of a collaboration over a longer time frame than a single interactive session. This omission is will in part be filled by services external to Sugar, such as Moodle or AMADIS. However, some aspects of the yet-to-be-implemented Bulletin Board would also meet these needs. (Better versioning in the Journal/Datastore—in the roadmap for 0.84—will play a role as well.) The Bulletin Board is designed to be a place for the persistent sharing of objects and actions between a group of collaborators. In some sense, one could think of it as a share, persistent clipboard. Bulletin Boards would be created in support of group projects that involve multiple activities and multiple sessions. We should develop a requirements document and architectural description of what is needed in order to both best leverage existing tools and set realistic goals for any Sugar developments.

10. PlayGo: Paul Barchilon provided some very thoughtful feedback on the PlayGo Activity. What struck me was that he kept returning to how various design decisions impact the opportunity for children to engage in learning (See [http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/games/2008-October/000743.html PlayGo feedback]).

=== Community jams, meetups, and meetings ===

11. Lima translation sprint: We gathered at the University of San Martin de Porres for two intense days. Through the courtesy of the OLPC foundation, Sugar Labs, and USMP, we had the opportunity to meet for a few days of translation work. Rafael Ortiz and Sebastian Silva provided the logistical support. We worked shoulder to shoulder alongside community volunteers, as well as a team distributed collaborators who made their contributions both at headquarters at the university and via the Internet from different parts of Peru.

The distance work was made possible by our infrastructure collaboration, IRC, mailing lists, and especially the parallel translation tool available in FLOSS Manuals, which allows you to drag and drop text and images between documents. One challenge we had was to regenerate many of the screenshots of Sugar containing text in English. (There is more work to do.)

The team would like to take this opportunity to thank Sr. Hernan Pachas and Engineer Waldy Grandez of University San Martin de Porres for all their help in organizing the event, publicity, support, snacks and Peruvian entertainment. See our work in [http://translate.flossmanuals.net/bin/view/Sugar_es Sugar_es] and please lend a hand in completing the work.

=== Tech Talk ===

12. NetworkManager 0.7: Marco Pesenti Gritti and Simon Schampijer worked on porting Sugar to NetworkManager 0.7. They made lots of progress and now have something “sort of” functional. They still need to get security handling in shape (e.g., WEP), implement settings persistence and reimplement frame devices. (Someone also need to port our mesh patches to 0.7 before we can add UI for them.)

13. Developer tools: Marco started writing some release automation scripts and wrote a script to a mock build of sugar-jhbuild for easier testing on the OLPC XO-1 laptop. He switched jhbuild and buildbot away from Fedora 8 and Ubuntu 7.04 as the glib they provide is now too old. And he managed to get new SLiM (a simple login manager) into Fedora Rawhide. We need to build a new LiveCD with selinux enabled. Next week Marco plans to mark existing public API as stable/unstable/deprecated, get activities rpms reviewed, and create a new LiveCD.

14. Sugar improvements: Marco investigated Browse/Firefox memory issues and posted a summary on the mailing lists. Kernel hackers help needed! He also finished up a zoom-levels refactoring: He got rid of the annoying flickering. He and Tomeu Vizoso have been looking into drawing performance. They plan to start seriously working on performance next week. Marco also did some shell code refactoring.

15. XOCamp: Marco has written three proposals for the November XOCamp. (I am working on one for the Portfolio as well.) There are many more being posted on the Sugar and Devel lists.

16. Gentoo: Aleksey Lim has posted instructions for building Sugar on Gentoo (See [[Community/Distributions/Gentoo
|Gentoo]]).

17. Ejabberd: Jonas Smedegaard reports that Ejabberd has had the patches applied for some time now on Debian. In other words, “the next stable release of Debian will support Sugar out of the box.” So will the next release of Ubuntu (Intrepid) due to release this week, as they borrow these patches from Debian (Morgan Collett has written up the much simpler process of getting ejabberd up and running at [http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Installing_ejabberd/deb Installing ejabberd on Debian]).

18. Gnash: Rob Savoye has new rpms for Gnash available for testing (“for the brave at heart”).

#!/bin/sh
# install livna
sudo yum http://rpm.livna.org/livna-release-9.rpm

# install ffmpeg from livna
sudo yum install -y ffmpeg

# get rid of the old build of 0.8.3
sudo rpm -ev gnash gnash-plugin

# install gnash
sudo rpm -iv \
http://www.getgnash.org/packages/snapshots/fedora/gnash-20081025-1.i386.rpm

# install the plugin
sudo rpm -iv \
http://www.getgnash.org/packages/snapshots/fedora/gnash-plugin-20081025-1.i386.rpm

19. Other software releases this week include:
* TurtleArt-13.xo
* HablarConSara-1.xo

=== Sugar Labs ===

20. Self-organizing map (SOM): Gary Martin has generated another SOM from the past week of discussion on the IAEP mailing list (Please see [[:Image:2008-October-18-24-som.jpg|SOM]]).

[[Category:Sugar Digest]]

Archive/Current Events/2008-11-25

2016-12-19T13:33:29Z

KachachanC: Undo revision 99660 by KachachanC (talk)

Archive/Current Events/2008-07-07

2016-12-19T13:32:23Z

KachachanC: Undo revision 99663 by KachachanC (talk)

Archive/Current Events/2008-12-09

2016-12-19T13:32:17Z

KachachanC: Undo revision 99661 by KachachanC (talk)

<noinclude>{{ GoogleTrans-en | es =show | bg =show | zh-CN =show | zh-TW =show | hr =show | cs =show | da =show | nl =show | fi =show | fr =show | de =show | el =show | hi =show | it =show | ja =show | ko =show | no =show | pl =show | pt =show | ro =show | ru =show | sv =show }}</noinclude>

=== Sugar Digest ===

1. Bonjour: I gave the keynote at the first Netbook World Summit in Paris (See [[Marketing Team/Presentations|Presentations]]). The opening welcome was delivered by Hervé Yahi, CEO of Mandriva, and indeed Mandriva was well represented at the congress. Yahi asked, "How big will the netbook market become?" He (and almost every subsequent speaker) broke the market down into two categories: a primary tool in the emerging market and a second device in the developed world. In my talk, I suggested that the netbook was at the forefront of the emerging cultural and technological battle between telephony and computing—i.e., the culture of service and the culture of creation. Inviting children into the community of learners and problem-solvers is ''the'' opportunity afforded by giving them access to computation and "learning as a verb".

OLPC's Bastien Guéry (of Haiti-deployment fame; soon moving to Lebanon) and Patrick Ferran, director of a educational netbook company, Gdium.com (a MIPS platform running Mandriva), held a panel discussion on education. Collaboration was the hot topic—the Sugar model is attractive even in the developed world. And, as always, how to change the culture of learning in schools remains a conundrum.

The netbook hardware session featured a panel with representatives from ASUS, Samsung, Qualcomm, Lenovo, and MSI. ASUS is interested in offering a network bundle with web storage and Linux application bundles. Their original idea was the laptop as a second PC, but now they are also targeted to the first PC market. Samsung has entered the netbook market recently and has big, but ambiguous plans. They are also thinking hard about connectivity. (It is ironic that roughly 15-years ago, when I was on the IBM mobile computing advisory board, I tried to convince them to make connectivity a product differentiator. Their response was to sell off their Global connectivity business. Sigh.) Qualcomm, which has 30% of the handset market, announced a new chipset to compete in the netbook space. Their chips provide connectivity and the multimedia functionality in phones. The always connect/always on nature of a phone is the kind of experience that they are trying to bring to the netbook market. Its focus is a mobile device—moving towards phone-like experience. Lenovo is game—they are thinking in terms of corporate buyers for a variety of categories, including education. MSI is a French OEM that makes the Wind product. They are explicitly targeting education in the emerging market. Their Wind Box is a fanless, screenless brick, which may have potential for a low-end school server.

The moderator asked what are the criteria for choosing for the OS on these devices: Lenovo sees predominately new users to date. (Although the world-wide economic slowdown is playing a role as well.) Their education customers are Linux-focused; consumers are asking for both. Qualcomm sees this as a new market—the best of the wireless world and the best of the laptop world—a new device. Samsung thinks the user wants something simple for the second PC—web browsing. The first-PC market is looking for "standard" systems (XP). ASUS is also splitting their strategy between emerging and mature markets. Everyone agreed that netbooks are not cannibalizing the traditional notebook market (but they are having an impact on price). But also everyone seems to be drifting towards larger screens, a hard disk, and Windows—along with a higher price. "10 inches is where the market is going." The retail market is asking for XP, but the professional and vertical markets, e.g., education are asking for Linux.

The follow-on panel was pretty depressing: Are netbooks mobile device or PC replacements. Mozilla opined always-on connectivity is essential, the browser is ''the'' application and nothing else is important, e.g., the OS doesn't matter and running non-web-based applications is "old think". In contradiction to this, "Linux has momentum and it is a place for innovation; you innovate because you can." [http://www.thinkgos.com/ gOS], who makes "Cloud", a Linux distribution that focuses on a browser, with an application "doc" in the browser. It is a "dual boot" machine, but the Linux distribution is instant on to a browser. Xandros argued that "Economics drives adoption of Linux from the OEM perspective"; but now there is a race in the application space. There is a 20-Euro difference in the OEM price between XP and Linux, but that is not enough to convince an OEM to switch away from the mainstream. The netbook started as a new type of device, but now it is marketed as a mini-laptop, which is why Windows is getting a larger market share: the consumer as consumer.

The final panel featured service providers. SFR (www.sfr.com) has its base of customers using their services for web access from mobile phones; they have recently expanded into the netbook (specifically, the eeePC market) by offering 3G connectivity. Comwax (www.comwax.com) offers a touch-based ("iPhone on a notebook") user experience—"always-on social networks" being the buzz phrase most often heard at the meeting. They tout lots of Sugar-like features: 1 click; unified contact list; and the seemingly ubiquitous application store. They'll be marketing through mobile carriers. gloBull (www.myglobull.com) focused their presentation on mobility and security. They have a secure boot that then launches a signed virtual environment—Windows or XP. (Sound familiar?)

A concluding presentation was given by IDC, a market research company, entitled "Netbook market opportunity: Hype or hope?" IDC believe that netbooks represent a big opportunity: 30 million units by 2012 (35% annual growth per year). (OLPC is only a very small consideration in their market projections. I guess they are playing wait and see if his prediction of 200 million XOs in 2009 running Windows will be realized.) Price and ease of use are considered the key contributions to the market share. (What does ease of use mean when we are talking about vanilla XP?) Intel and Microsoft have been very aggressive in marketing in EMEA (l'Europe, le Moyen-Orient (Middle East) et l'Afrique). In EMEA, the OS is rapidly switching to XP with big push in retail channels by Microsoft and 80% of shipments are to consumers as second laptops with laptop expectations for their netbooks. However, IDC sees one-to-one computing in education as a big opportunity—50% of all portable PCs sold to education by 2012 (but a small percentage of the overall netbook market). Telcos are beginning to enter the netbook market—in an effort to push mobile broadband. The netbook fits that role, with the added benefit that they pay a smaller subsidy per consumer. All of this is putting pricing pressure on traditional notebooks. The big surprise to me is the extent to which Europe is dominating the netbook market—I always thought they were a mobile phone culture.

The reception was held at the Paris Museum of Modern Art (MAM) where we had a private viewing of a Dufy retrospective and cocktails in the Matisse Room (See [http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3253/3075519670_5a008de2cb_b.jpg Dufy] and [http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3041/3075519684_b5940e9c23_b.jpg Matisse]).

----

Addendum:

I went to one last panel at the Open World Forum in Paris: Ensuring the sustainability of FLOSS developer communities and business ecosystems. The description looked promising: Research, education, industry, public bodies, end-users: how is FLOSS changing competition and cooperation behavior? What kind of governance and financial support are required to foster and optimize FLOSS ecosystems?

And the lineup of panelists seemed well chosen: Elmar Geese, Chairman, Linux Verband; Wang Huaimin, Professor, China National University of Defense Technology; Mike Milinkovich, Executive Director, Eclipse Foundation; Cedric Thomas, CEO, OW2 Consortium; and Anthony Wasserman, Executive Director, Center for Open Source Investigation, Carnegie Mellon Silicon Valley.

I should have spent the afternoon at Musée D'Orsay. These guys had absolutely nothing to say about anything. No insight into FLOSS, organization, community, or sustainability. Nor did they have an answer to a simple prepared question directed to them—how to communicate about FLOSS to potential "customers"? They answered with nothing more sophisticated than business-school-101 sound bites: "make a strong business case." Yeah, and... I asked them to get concrete and got more of the same: "know your customer's decision-making criteria." It could have been sales people from any industry up there. Maybe that is a sign that free software has matured to the point where it is just another commodity. Sure doesn't feel that way from the trenches. Or maybe it is an indication that free software is lacking strong leadership in the areas of business and marketing. That seems closer to the truth. I will have to look elsewhere—to the community—for inspiration.

----

2. Threads: There have been a number of interesting discussions on the lists this week:

* Luis Michelena and Daniel Ajoy have been in a dynamic discussion of new Turtle Art features driven by pedagogical features being voiced by teachers ([http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/olpc-sur/2008-November/001359.html] and [http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/olpc-sur/2008-November/001455.html])
* Tomeu Vizoso has blogged about his experience walking the teachers in Uruguay through the process of building a "mind map" activity ([http://blog.tomeuvizoso.net/2008/11/labyrinth-experience.html]).
* Martin Langhoff has started a thread in the laptop.org wiki regarding the school server Moodle design ([http://wiki.laptop.org/go/XS_Moodle_design XS Moodle design]).

3. Looking for a project?: Tomeu has posted notes from the Sugar Camp brainstorming session regarding collaboration features for Sugar Activities. Lots of opportunities to get your start developing in Sugar ([[Marketing Team/Events/Sugarcamp Boston 2008/Minutes#Items_from_the_roadmap_brainstorm|Roadmap Brainstorm]]).

4. Ouch: A harsh criticism of Sugar from a blogger can be found at
[http://learnonline.wordpress.com/2008/12/01/my-experience-with-olpc-in-tuvalu/ My experience with OLPC in Tuvalu]. I've extracted it in part below with some acknowledgements and rebuttals.

: List of things wrong with OLPCs Operating System:

: 1. The connectivity metaphor on start up is inappropriate for people in areas where connectivity is a long way away. The OLPC is more useful to people in Tuvalu as a device for games, media and typing before it is for connecting to the Internet, so the connectivity interface should not be the main focus at start up.

Why is the community metaphor inappropriate? It is available regardless of Internet connectivity—95% of the schools in Peru are off the Internet, and yet the children and their teachers can use Sugar to collaborate within the community. It makes a very efficient use of whatever Internet resources are available.

: 2. That said, we were using wireless connectivity in the Government building, but the OLPCs holding that connection was flaky. We had no trouble keeping a connection to the network on the Windows machines, but the OLPCs kept dropping. Placing a Wireless modem in the room with us seemed to help the situation. Another problem relating to connectivity was the amount of time some of the OLPCs took to connect. Some didn’t at all. All of them need clearer indication of progress in connecting.

Improved wireless stability remains a goal, but the situation is much improved from Sugar 0.71, which seems to be the version of Sugar being tested (See #4 below).

: 3. The pop up menu for the operating system is very frustrating and seems to be affected by processing. Sometimes it is slow to initiate and even slower to disappear. I think its better to use the key on the keyboard instead, and turn off the mouse over feature.

I will conject that this comment is in regard to the hover menus. They come up instantly from a right-mouse click. But this seemed not be discoverable in the first three hours of use. A keyboard shortcut may also be a good addition.

: 4. Need better preloaders for the software. When we clicked an icon the software takes a while to load. Sometimes the loader dialog that says “starting” would take too long to appear. The icon does appear in the pie chart indicating active applications, perhaps something in that graphic could more effectively illustrate it as loading.

The "pie chart" comment suggests that the evaluation was done on a very old version of Sugar—pre 0.82—which makes it somewhat irrelevant. Launch time is better, but we have a ways to go.

: 5. The browser must have tabbed browsing! If I missed where it was, then it is too hard to find. There was no right click option on any of the OLPC we were using, and I don’t know if there is meant to be. If the tabbed browsing relies on a right click then we were thwarted. Also, I think the browser needs work on its layout and features. The address bar takes up too much room and for some unknown reason wants to display the page name instead of the URL. The URL is for more useful in terms of information, and having to click into the address bar just to check the URL is just silly. The scroll bars are too small, and especially noticeable when managing a website with a scrolling window inside it, like the edit view of a wiki. We didn’t try any ajax, java or flash – but I hope they are good to go!

Tabs in the Browse Activity are still on the wish list. The full address is revealed if you click in the address bar—again, apparently not readily discoverable in the first 3 hours. Java and Flash are compatible with Sugar, but there may well be performance issues on the OLPC-XO.

: 6. I couldn’t work out how to manage files. I could download PDFs ok, but it was a bit of a fumble to display them, and I have no idea how to save them. I tried plugging in a USB but as far as I could tell, no new icon appeared offering me access, and nowhere in the browser of the PDF display could I find how to save the file to the USB.

The Browse Activity offers to open the Journal (where downloaded files are stored), but perhaps not in the older builds. The USB shows up in the Journal, but perhaps it should show up in the Frame as well, as a notification when it is inserted?

: 7. I wonder about the touch pad. I am used to using them and use the one on this Asus all the time, but seeing as the OLPCs are so ready to think outside the square, lets rethink the touch pad. If you didn’t have the touch pad, you could have so much more room for keys! Apart from supplying a small mouse (which is infinitely more easy to use) I wonder if the game controllers in the screen could substitute a mouse, as could smart use of the tab key. That little blue dial that IBM used in the middle of their keyboard had potential I thought.

We have more work to do on keyboard shortcuts, especially on non-OLPC hardware. As regards the OLPC-XO tablet, 'nough said.

: 8. I reckon the operating system and software should completely change, and I’d suggest something like what Asus has done. I can certainly appreciate the innovations that I’ve found so far, but the extreme difference between the OLPC and other OS is too great, and will affect the usefulness of the laptops… think of it like Vista.. you are causing stress and lock in by being so different. The OLPC is not the place to experiment if your primary objective is to offer people in poorer economies to access and exploit opportunities. Of course there is the new opportunity of servicing and administering the OLPCs themselves, but that’s hardly sustainable and I hope it wasn’t planned for!

Growing community and jobs around Sugar is an important part of the roadmap. But also providing a platform that enhances learning is our primary concern. We've not proved our case yet, but there is plenty of evidence that a vanilla XP-approach is not having a positve impact on learning and hence is truly not a wise investment—"unlimited potential", indeed.

=== Community jams, meet-ups, and meetings ===

5. FUDCon will be held at MIT (Cambridge, MA) 9–11 January. If you can attend, please *SIGN UP* on the wiki page: [http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FUDCon/FUDConF11 FUDConF11] and please recommend topics for the hackfest. [http://paul.frields.org/ Paul Frields] is available to answer any questions you may have.

6. Kevin Cole reports that video from the last OLPC Learning Club DC is available at [http://www.careercenter.arlington.k12.va.us/gctaa/xolaptop_bee_project.html xolaptop bee].

7. There will be a Skolelinux/Debian-Edu developer gathering in Trondheim, Norway 23–25 January 2009 (See [http://friprogramvareiskolen.no/Gathering/2009-01-Trondheim 2009-01 Trondheim]).

8. There will be a Python for Teachers workshop at [http://pycon.org Pycon] in Chicago in late March, 2009.

=== Tech Talk ===

9. SOAS: Simon Peter reports that he has updated Sbuntu (Sugar for Ubuntu Live USB) to Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex). This should resolve many issues that were present in the earlier version. ([http://dev.laptop.org/~probono/sbuntu/ Sbuntu]). Please report Sbuntu issues to Peter and issues related to usb-creator to [https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/usb-creator USB creator].

Morgan Collett has put some updated Sugar packages in the Ubuntu Sugar
Team's PPA: [https://launchpad.net/~sugarteam/+archive Sugar archive]. He is updating them to include support for Network Manager 0.7, so that Neighborhood View will support connecting to access points again.

=== Sugar Labs ===

10. Self-organizing map (SOM): Gary Martin has generated another SOM from the past week of discussion on the IAEP mailing list (Please see [[:Image:2008-November-22-28-som.jpg|SOM]]).

[[Category:Sugar Digest]]

Archive/Current Events/2008-12-29

2016-12-19T13:32:14Z

KachachanC: Undo revision 99662 by KachachanC (talk)

Archive/Current Events/2008-10-27

2016-12-19T13:32:09Z

KachachanC: Undo revision 99665 by KachachanC (talk)

Archive/Current Events/2008-09-22

2016-12-19T13:32:05Z

KachachanC: Undo revision 99664 by KachachanC (talk)

Archive/Current Events/2008-11-10

2016-12-19T13:31:59Z

KachachanC: Undo revision 99666 by KachachanC (talk)

Archive/Current Events/2008-12-22

2016-12-19T13:31:55Z

KachachanC: Undo revision 99667 by KachachanC (talk)

Archive/Current Events/2008-12-15

2016-12-19T13:31:50Z

KachachanC: Undo revision 99668 by KachachanC (talk)

Archive/Current Events/2008-12-01

2016-12-19T13:31:06Z

KachachanC: Undo revision 99669 by KachachanC (talk)

Archive/Current Events/2008-12-01

2016-12-19T06:11:14Z

KachachanC:

{{Obsolete | Check https://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_Labs/Current_Events for latest current events}}
<noinclude>{{ GoogleTrans-en | es =show | bg =show | zh-CN =show | zh-TW =show | hr =show | cs =show | da =show | nl =show | fi =show | fr =show | de =show | el =show | hi =show | it =show | ja =show | ko =show | no =show | pl =show | pt =show | ro =show | ru =show | sv =show }}</noinclude>

=== Sugar Digest ===

1. Sugar Camp Digest: First, I would like to thank Bernie Innocenti for organizing a great week. He was tireless in his efforts to find us meeting rooms, maintain the schedule, and help keep things together when tempers flared—as they will when people are passionate about their work. Second, I would like to thank the more than 30 people were able to attend in person and many more who joined by IRC or phone.

Unfortunately, I missed the first half of the meeting due to a scheduling conflict, but by all [[Marketing Team/Events/Sugarcamp Boston 2008/Minutes|reports]] it was a productive three days.

I joined the group on Thursdsay morning and it was clear that a rhythm had been established.
* Greg Smith led a useful discussion on how we could work better with the Sugar deployments (See [http://sugarlabs.org/wiki/images/0/0b/Sugar-meeting.odp Sugar-meeting.odp].
* Caroline Meeks got people excited about her plans to pilot "Sugar on a Stick" (Sugar on LiveUSB) in a Boston Public School (See [http://docs.google.com/Presentation?id=dddknwgs_360gwgwbnf2 Sugar on a Stick presentation]).
* Brendan Powers talked about the various LTSP deployment approaches taken by Resara when they work with schools and how Sugar could be used under these conditions (See [http://www.resara.com/presentation.ppt Resara.ppt]). Sugar is rapidly moving into a broader place.
* Ed McNierney led a discussion on the needs of OLPC in the coming months—he presented a number of challenges, not too many of which the Sugar community can help with or have much influence over. Reading between the lines it was clear that OLPC will not directly support Sugar development itself much longer. We need to acknowledge that as a community and continue to work with OLPC while seizing the other opportunities for distributing Sugar that are emerging.

Friday was very up beat and productive.
* Evangeline Harris Stefanakis led a discussion on the use of portfolios that was inspirational. (I followed up the discussion with a demonstration of a Sugar portfolio tool I am building—See [http://sugarlabs.org/wiki/images/3/36/Portfolios.odp Portfolios.odp]). The ensuing discussion reminded everyone that Sugar is "an education project."
* Greg Dekoenigsberg, David Farning, and I then led a discussion about the current state of Sugar Labs (See [http://sugarlabs.org/wiki/images/6/6f/SugarLabsOverview.odp SugarLabsOverview.odp]). David reviewed the team structure and Greg then led us in a much-needed marketing exercise to clearly articulate out vision and goals in just a few sentences (our elevator pitch). One concrete outcome of the discussion will be the creation of To Do lists on every team page in the wiki. Please help us populate these lists with tasks for both newcomers and veteran Sugar contributors.
* C. Scott Ananian gave a rapid-fire talk about collaboration that highlighted the need and opportunity to make collaboration with non-Sugar users more facile (See [http://dev.laptop.org/git?p=users/cscott/talks;a=blob_plain;f=sugarcamp-collab.pdf;hb=HEAD sugarcamp-collab.pdf]).
* Christian Marc Schmidt and Eben Eliason led a discussion about future design opportunities for Sugar (See [http://www.christianmarcschmidt.com/projects/sugarlabs/081121_sugar_design.pdf sugar_design.pdf]). We made progress on the Home View, the Journal, and collaboration.
* Christian also proposed that we create a small static HTML web site for sugarlabs.org to give a high-level overview of the project and direct people to appropriate areas of the wiki (See [[Marketing Team#Sugar_Labs_website]]).

Saturday, a smaller group met. We continued the marketing discussion, Bernie gave an overview of the Sugar Labs infrastructure (See [http://www.codewiz.org/pub/sugar/slides/sugarcamp/SugarLabsInfrastructure.odp SugarLabsInfrastructure.odp]), and then we discussed the Sugar Roadmap, coming up with specific milestones (and champions) for the Sugar 0.84 Release. We focused on stabilization and further development of key Sugar differentiators such as collaboration, the Journal, and view source. 0.84 is going to rock! We also did some brainstorming about how to enhance the collaboration features of the core Sugar Activities (Fructose)—we'll be soliciting more ideas and volunteers in coming weeks.

Mel Chua led a wrap-up discussion where we discussed what was awesome, interesting, and frustrating about Sugar Camp. The awesome list was lengthy!! To me, seeing the energy and focus of such a talented group of people gave me confidence that Sugar has real legs. Perhaps the most actionable frustration is that we didn't do well at soliciting the ideas and opinions of the less aggressive or more remote members of the community. It felt as if some important voices are not being heard; we need that input and feedback. Suggestions as to how we can do better are welcome.

=== Community jams, meet-ups, and meetings ===

2. FUDCON: The Fedora users conference will be held at MIT on 9–11 January. Stay tuned for details.

=== Tech Talk ===

3. Sugar: Simon Schampijer finished the frame device support for wireless devices in Sugar. He updated the radio off code in the control panel to work with NM 0.7 and fixed several small issues in the mesh code. He fully back ported these changes to sugar-0.82 for usage in the upcoming F10. With the help of Sayamindu he fixed an error which was preventing Sugar to start with the Russian locale and added a log out option to the menu.

Simon also issued the second developer release in the 0.84 cycle ([http://dev.laptop.org/pub/sugar/sources/sugar/sugar-0.83.3.tar.bz2 sugar-0.83.3.tar.bz2] and a new Sugar toolkit [http://dev.laptop.org/pub/sugar/sources/sugar-toolkit/sugar-toolkit-0.83.2.tar.bz2 sugar-toolkit-0.83.2.tar.bz2]). In addition to bug fixing there are some changes:

* "View source" support. As a fall-back, the source of an Activity is shown, but this behavior can be overridden, e.g., Browse still shows the source of the document.
* Sugar now supports setting up a priority list of languages: Not all programs have translations for all languages. You can create a list of languages in the Control panel that are used to display messages in place of a non-existent translation.
* More work has been going into the Sugar support for Network Manager 0.7. We finished the support for wireless devices in the frame, updated the radio off code in the control panel to work with NM 0.7 and added WPA support.
* Three more activities are now part of Fructose: Image Viewer, TurtleArt, and Jukebox.

4. Activity activity:

* Pippy-30
* TurtleArt-18
* Map-2.xo
* ImageViewer-4
* Browse-101
* Read-61

=== Sugar Labs ===

5. Self-organizing map (SOM): Gary Martin has generated another SOM from the past week of discussion on the IAEP mailing list (Please see [[:Image:2008-November-15-21-som.jpg|SOM]]).

[[Category:Sugar Digest]]

Archive/Current Events/2008-12-15

2016-12-19T06:09:28Z

KachachanC:

Archive/Current Events/2008-12-22

2016-12-19T06:09:27Z

KachachanC:

{{Obsolete | Please refer to https://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_Labs/Current_Events for latest current events}}
<noinclude>{{ GoogleTrans-en | es =show | bg =show | zh-CN =show | zh-TW =show | hr =show | cs =show | da =show | nl =show | fi =show | fr =show | de =show | el =show | hi =show | it =show | ja =show | ko =show | no =show | pl =show | pt =show | ro =show | ru =show | sv =show }}</noinclude>

=== Sugar Digest ===

1. Sugar narrative: Caroline Meeks and I participated in a readathon at the Gardner School in Allston last week, giving us an opportunity to spend some time in classrooms in the school where we are planning a Sugar-on-a-Stick pilot. We also had an opportunity to meet with a former classroom teacher who is now focusing full time on curriculum development. There was synergy between all of our goals: good things will happen. However, one thing became obvious very early in the discussion: we are lacking a good narrative about Sugar and how it is used in schools. We have lots of pictures of children with laptops, but few of these pictures are illustrative of learning. We have some data—most notably from the Peru deployment—about the impact of Sugar on learning, but again, these are data illustrating results, not the process of achieving those results. While more deployment guides and lesson plans are being written, we still lack a compelling narrative.

Maybe it is time to dust off an old idea: Why don't we create ''a day in the life of Sugar'', a movie/telenovela/graphic novel about various experiences with Sugar in the classroom? We have loads of material—we just need to start telling the story. Anyone interested in taking the lead on this project?

2. OLPC's Change the World program: It is refreshing to read that OLPC is beginning to embrace programs at a scale that can be launched at a grassroots level. Let's hope that this bottom-up approach is given a chance to get some momentum.

3. Sugar Workshop plan: Rafael Ortiz posted [http://sugarlabs.org/go/DeploymentTeam/Deployment_guide_sur/TallerBuinaima the workshop plan] from a teacher workshop that took place at the Bunaima Foundation in Bogota, Colombia.

4. Local labs: We've been discussing frameworks for local/regional Sugar Labs. Please join the weekly discussion of the deployment team on Wednesdays at 14:00 UTC on irc.freenode.net channel #sugar-meeting. We'd appreciate more input from deployment teams around the world. There is a [[Deployment Team/Local_Lab_MOU|draft of a sample memorandum of understanding (MOU)]] between Sugar Labs and any organization that would like to establish a local lab. Please add your comments.

5. There is also [[Deployment Team/Getting Involved#Proposals|Proposals Section]] in the wiki for aggregating information about potential grant opportunities for Sugar Labs and region groups. Please help us identify and pursue funding opportunities.

6. GNOME: I will be representing Sugar on the GNOME foundation board of advisers. If you have any Sugar-related concerns you would like voiced, please let me know.

7. Ignorant and seemingly happy that way: It seems there is still quite a bit of misinformation about free software in Texas (See [http://austinist.com/2008/12/10/aisd_teacher_throws_fit_over_studen.php Teacher Throws Fit]).

=== Community jams, meet-ups, and meetings ===

8. It is not too late to sign up for [http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FUDCon/FUDConF11 FUDConF11], which will be held at MIT (Cambridge, MA) 9–11 January.

=== Tech Talk ===

9. git.sugarlabs.org: Marco Pesenti Gritti reports that the official repositories for the following modules have moved on git.sugarlabs.org:
* sugar
* sugar-base
* sugar-toolkit
* sugar-datastore
* sugar-presence-service
* sugar-jhbuild
* read
* chat

We are still working out some of the details regarding the process of a general migration to the new server.

10. Sugar team:

Marco's week also included:
* looking into palette bugs in Sugar 0.83;
* starting a [[Development Team/TODO|team TODO]], as substitute for the roadmap, which will be reviewed weekly;
* writing about upstream/downstream relations with Sugar Labs;
* updating jhbuild dependencies (to keep up with Tomeu Vizoso's changes);
* discussing with Mel Chau and Simon Schampijer about testing team and bug squad; and
* thinking about how to involve the community more directly in Sugar development; self-contained bundle vs packages with dependencies; and how to better expose information about core modules and activities to developers.

Marco also made good progress on collaboration dog-fooding, which reminds me: since we use Jabber extensively in Sugar, why aren't we using it for our discussions about Sugar?

Tomeu's week included:
* working on file transfer in the Journal. Collabora Ltd. employees have been very helpful,
especially Guillaume Desmottes.
* adapting http://addons.mozilla.org to Sugar activities (with David Farning)

11. Activities:

Vincent Povirk reports that the Wine activity (Windows emulator) has advanced to the point where he think it is ready for testing by actual users (See http://wiki.winehq.org/SugaredWine).

I've release TurtleArt-23.xo, which does a local caching of the render SVG images, resulting in a great improvement in launch speed (with the exception of the very first time you run it). Next up for TurtleArt, a save option that outputs Logo code.

Food Force is available for testing (See http://code.google.com/pfoodforce/downloads/list).

=== Sugar Labs ===

12. Self-organizing map (SOM): Gary Martin has generated another SOM from the past week of discussion on the IAEP mailing list (Please see [[:Image:2008-December-6-12-som.jpg|SOM]]).

[[Category:Sugar Digest]]

Archive/Current Events/2008-11-10

2016-12-19T06:09:24Z

KachachanC:

{{Obsolete | Please refer to https://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_Labs/Current_Events for latest current events}}
<noinclude>{{ GoogleTrans-en | es =show | bg =show | zh-CN =show | zh-TW =show | hr =show | cs =show | da =show | nl =show | fi =show | fr =show | de =show | el =show | hi =show | it =show | ja =show | ko =show | no =show | pl =show | pt =show | ro =show | ru =show | sv =show }}</noinclude>

=== Sugar Digest ===

1. Peru by the numbers: It has only been a few months, but the early indications are quite positive regarding the one-to-one laptop program in Peru.

:40013 computers delivered to students and teachers
:2140 teachers of 569 educational institutions trained
:100000 computers in the process of delivery
:8000 teachers in training process
:150000 computers will be delivered in 2009

A preliminary survey of students of primary schools in rural areas suggests:
* Evidence of increased motivation
** The students care about what they are doing.
** The students feel the endeavor to learn more and [[Discovery|discover]] new experiences is worthwhile.
** The students experience a high degree of interest in attending school.
** The students feel the satisfaction of doing something they like.
** The students feel the joy discovering
* Evidence of a new relationship to learning
** The students feel an increased creative tension because they feel that should and need to learn.
** The students feel an increased responsibility to be attentive and disciplined in class.
** The students are "committing themselves"—facing the challenge of new knowledge.
** The students are cognizant that they "have a lot more to learn and what they know is" not sufficient.
** The students have a remarkable rapprochement with their teachers.
** The students have an increased confidence and security and an improvement in their interpersonal relationships.
** The students feel that their opinions and ideas are important.
** The students are free to decide what to do and show more initiative and creativity.
* Evidence of academic achievement
** Improved reading comprehension with respect to national standards.

It is too soon to tease out all of the factors that have contributed to this changes, but unequivocally, the children of Peru are seizing the opportunity. I look forward to more comprehensive data from the field.

2. Questioning “General” Education: Marvin Minsky has written another essay in his series about how our computers could help to advance our children’s educational development. The new essay begins with a quote from George Pólya.

:''It is better to solve one problem five different ways,''
:''than to solve five different problems one way.''

See [http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Questioning_General_Education Memo 4]. Previous essays are at [http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Marvin_Minsky_essays Minsky Essays].

3. Knight News Challenge: Sugar Labs applied for four Knight Foundation grants (all four are linked to from the [[Deployment Team#Proposals|Deployment page]]).

=== Community jams, meetups, and meetings ===

==== Code Camp Paris ====
Lionel Laské of OLPC France announced OLPC CodeCamp in Paris on 15 November (See [http://olpc-france.org/wiki/index.php?title=OLPC_France_CodeCamp_15_november CodeCamp]). Five workshops are planned:
* Sugar: development and experimentation on Sugar/Python;
* School Server: setting up and test of school server on multiple platform (standard PC, Booba server, CherryPal, etc.);
* Mono: development of new activities using Mono;
* Pedagogic usage: Feedbacks from Haiti, Ethiopia and Palestine deployment; Brainstorming with French teachers to find usage and class activity;
* French localization: French translators will work all the days to translate in French, Sugar, activities and FLOSS manual.

==== Sugar Camp Boston ====
There will be a [[Marketing Team/Events/Sugarcamp Boston 2008]] gathering in Cambridge, MA on 17-21 November.

=== Tech Talk ===

6. 0.84 Release cycle: Simon Schampijer and the release team have gotten the Sucrose Development 0.83.1 Release out the door (See [[0.84/0.83.1 Notes|0.83.1]]). This is the first of the 0.84 cycle. The code base has seen many refactoring efforts: To improve performance several heavy shell dependencies have been dropped; the Journal and the shell service have been merged into the shell. The datastore has been rewritten (simplified) to improve maintainability while keeping the same API in place. We are now using Gconf to store the Sugar profile. Some enhancements have been made to the clipboard to provide visual consistency with the Sugar environment. Also, Sugar modules are being marked as STABLE / UNSTABLE / DEPRECATED (See [[Development Team/API_policy|API Policy]]). And of course many many bugs have been fixed. Thanks to all who have been contributing to this new release.

7. Network Manager: Simon and Marco Pesenti Gritti have been working on the integration of NM 0.7 into Sugar. This will be of particular importance to facilitating network connectivity on non-OLPC-XO-1 platforms.

8. Usability testing : Carlos Mauro has been working on a measurement of usability and the development of a standard process for measurement for Sugar and Sugar Activities.

9. Presence service: A new release of Presence Service is available ([https://dev.laptop.org/pub/sugar/sources/sugar-presence-service/sugar-presence-service-0.83.1.tar.bz2 source]). Enhancements include improved interoperability with non-Sugar clients and integration with gconf.

10. Browse-100: Simon, Marco, and Tomeu Vizoso are happy to announce the 100th version of the Browse Activity! New features include better download/upload support. (Note: Browse-100 is dependent on the latest hulahop v0.4.7).

=== Sugar Labs ===

11. Self-organizing map (SOM): Gary Martin has generated another SOM from the past week of discussion on the IAEP mailing list (Please see [[:Image:2008-October-25-31-som.jpg|SOM]]).

[[Category:Sugar Digest]]

Archive/Current Events/2008-10-27

2016-12-19T06:08:58Z

KachachanC:

{{Obsolete | Please refer to https://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_Labs/Current_Events for latest current events}}
<noinclude>{{ GoogleTrans-en | es =show | bg =show | zh-CN =show | zh-TW =show | hr =show | cs =show | da =show | nl =show | fi =show | fr =show | de =show | el =show | hi =show | it =show | ja =show | ko =show | no =show | pl =show | pt =show | ro =show | ru =show | sv =show }}</noinclude>

=== Sugar Digest ===

1. Digital media and learning competition: I submitted a proposal to the [http://www.dmlcompetition.net DML competition]. The gist of our project plan is to reach out to and support the Sugar community of educators and software developers. We are seeking resources to expose more teachers and learners to the features and benefits of Sugar and further enable its use by: (1) stabilizing the software to the point where it is turnkey; (2) working with and learning from diverse communities that seek better ways to educate children; and (3) growing the number of users of and contributors to Sugar. I made a similar proposal to the Google 10^100 program; the focus is on building our developer and user communities.

2. Sugar on a stick: Caroline Meeks and I visited a Boston public school to discuss with them the possibility of piloting a USB Sugar deployment, where the children would use USB sticks to boot Sugar at school and at home, using whatever computers are available. This deployment enables a school to use Sugar without making an upfront investment in new computers. It could be a very cost-effective approach to bootstrapping Sugar communities.

3. Daniel Ajoy has updated a number of links on the [http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Sur OLPC Sur page] that point to pages that detail various Activities as they are being applied in the classroom.

=== Community jams, meetups, and meetings ===

4. Peru translation sprint: A number of us are in Lima (beginning Monday—today—at 15:30 UTC at USMP FIA) this week, working on the translation of the Sugar-related FLOSS manuals. We'll try to have a presence on IRC (irc.freenode.net #sugar-meeting and #olpc-content) during the sprint.

5. XOcamp2: C. Scott Ananian has been organizing a week of planning for the next OLPC XO release (9.1) to be held the week of November 17 in Cambridge, MA. He'd like participation and talk proposals from the Sugar Labs developers/users (the timing would be aligned with our 0.84 Release). Talk proposals should be sent to devel at lists.laptop.org.

=== Tech Talk ===

6. Sugar labs: David Van Assche reports that he has managed to get Sugar and collaboration via eJabbers working on a Linux terminal server (LTSP) using Ubuntu (a tip of the hat to those who offered their help on the #sugar channel). This means that you can now convert an existing networked lab to Sugar without installing any software on the client terminals. See [http://www.nubae.com/sugar-on-ltsp-ubuntu-intrepid-ibex LTSP Sugar on Ubuntu Intrepid] for a step-by-step guide. It should be easily replicated on other distributions by using a distro-specific package manager.

7. Journal: C. Scott has been working on a new design for the Journal (See [http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Journal_reloaded Journal Reloaded]). Lots of good ideas about making the Journal generally more friendly to users, developers, and to legacy applications.

8. GConf: Simon Schampijer has been landing the use of GConf for the profile in sugar-jhbuild to store preferences (See [http://www.gnome.org/projects/gconf/ GConf]). The old API in Sugar/profile has been kept around so as not to break older Activities—for example to request the nickname or the icon colors of the user. An advantage of the new scheme is that you can run multiple instances of the emulator by repeated issuing of the 'SUGAR_PROFILE=username sugar-emulator' command. This works because we use gconf-dbus in sugar-jhbuild and therefore run one gconf daemon per instance.

9. NetworkManager: Simon is working on adopting the Sugar shell to use NetworkManager 0.7 during the next week (See [http://blogs.gnome.org/dcbw/2007/10/15/networkmanager-07-is-the-new-chuck-norris/ Dan William's blog]).

10. Potpourri: As usual, Marco Pesenti Gritti has been busy; he:

* wrote a proposal about an API stability policy for Glucose; discussed in the Sugar meeting, approved with minor improvements; Marco will make the necessary changes and officially post it on the wiki;
* fixed various issues regarding the running of multiple Browse instances; file pickers and downloads are now opened in the correct window;
* started to refactor the zoom-levels part of the window-management logic based on a patch by Benjamin Schwartz to get rid of flickering in the Home View;
* poked OLPC distro developers about the Fedora-10 migration (Marco hopes we can make a call about it soon, because he'd like to use the GTK/GIO API to implement standard-compliant startup notification).
* thought about making the Sugar shell more standards compliant to better host legacy desktop applications; Sayamindu Dasgupta has volunteered to help—we are still looking for someone to take over the work of choosing and adapting a window manager to replace Matchbox.
* discussed the next generation Journal design with C. Scott and was happy to see that middle layer between Journal and file system was not dropped; they made a lot progress on syncing on how to gradually integrate it in Sugar;
* fixed various regressions from the the Sugar shell refactoring (Marco thanks everyone for the patience); and
* made some Fedora LiveCD improvements—in particular get SLiM (a simple login manager) to behave under selinux.

His pans for next week include:

* adding window management items to the 0.84 roadmap;
* following up with Benjamin about the icon cache, hopefully get near to something that can be integrated;
* looking into the LiveCD feedback (the principle blocker is NM 0.7 support, which Simon is working on;
* figuring out where and how to host source-code releases in preparation for 0.83.1 and starting to automating them;
* sending a reminder about new activity proposals to make sure no one is missing the deadline;
* finishing up zoom level refactoring and getting rid of the annoying flicker;
* trimming down the review queue; and
* reviewing and posting the API policy on the wiki.

11. Sceencast: Chris Ball has revisited the question of how to do a Screencast in Sugar. He has written a new version of the Screencast Activity ([http://dev.laptop.org/~cjb/screencast/Screencast-1.xo Screencast-1.xo]). An old version, built by MediaMods, is here ([http://mediamods.com/public-svn/camera-activity/tags/xo/Screencast-2.xo Screencast-2.xo]).

12: Other software releases this week include:
* Jukebox-3.xo

Gadget 0.0.2 has been released. Highlights of the "Monster Lake" release include:

* support for constraining activity search results;
* various bug fixes;
* the addition of load simulation tools for testing purposes; and
* support for multi-criteria search.

=== Sugar Labs ===

13. Self-organizing map (SOM): Gary Martin has generated another SOM from the past week of discussion on the IAEP mailing list (Please see [[:Image:2008-October-11-17-som.jpg]]).

[[Category:Sugar Digest]]

Archive/Current Events/2008-09-22

2016-12-19T06:05:16Z

KachachanC:

Archive/Current Events/2008-07-07

2016-12-19T06:04:53Z

KachachanC:

Archive/Current Events/2008-12-29

2016-12-19T06:04:07Z

KachachanC:

Archive/Current Events/2008-12-09

2016-12-19T06:03:56Z

KachachanC:

{{Obsolete | Refer to https://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_Labs/Current_Events for latest current events}}
<noinclude>{{ GoogleTrans-en | es =show | bg =show | zh-CN =show | zh-TW =show | hr =show | cs =show | da =show | nl =show | fi =show | fr =show | de =show | el =show | hi =show | it =show | ja =show | ko =show | no =show | pl =show | pt =show | ro =show | ru =show | sv =show }}</noinclude>

=== Sugar Digest ===

1. Bonjour: I gave the keynote at the first Netbook World Summit in Paris (See [[Marketing Team/Presentations|Presentations]]). The opening welcome was delivered by Hervé Yahi, CEO of Mandriva, and indeed Mandriva was well represented at the congress. Yahi asked, "How big will the netbook market become?" He (and almost every subsequent speaker) broke the market down into two categories: a primary tool in the emerging market and a second device in the developed world. In my talk, I suggested that the netbook was at the forefront of the emerging cultural and technological battle between telephony and computing—i.e., the culture of service and the culture of creation. Inviting children into the community of learners and problem-solvers is ''the'' opportunity afforded by giving them access to computation and "learning as a verb".

OLPC's Bastien Guéry (of Haiti-deployment fame; soon moving to Lebanon) and Patrick Ferran, director of a educational netbook company, Gdium.com (a MIPS platform running Mandriva), held a panel discussion on education. Collaboration was the hot topic—the Sugar model is attractive even in the developed world. And, as always, how to change the culture of learning in schools remains a conundrum.

The netbook hardware session featured a panel with representatives from ASUS, Samsung, Qualcomm, Lenovo, and MSI. ASUS is interested in offering a network bundle with web storage and Linux application bundles. Their original idea was the laptop as a second PC, but now they are also targeted to the first PC market. Samsung has entered the netbook market recently and has big, but ambiguous plans. They are also thinking hard about connectivity. (It is ironic that roughly 15-years ago, when I was on the IBM mobile computing advisory board, I tried to convince them to make connectivity a product differentiator. Their response was to sell off their Global connectivity business. Sigh.) Qualcomm, which has 30% of the handset market, announced a new chipset to compete in the netbook space. Their chips provide connectivity and the multimedia functionality in phones. The always connect/always on nature of a phone is the kind of experience that they are trying to bring to the netbook market. Its focus is a mobile device—moving towards phone-like experience. Lenovo is game—they are thinking in terms of corporate buyers for a variety of categories, including education. MSI is a French OEM that makes the Wind product. They are explicitly targeting education in the emerging market. Their Wind Box is a fanless, screenless brick, which may have potential for a low-end school server.

The moderator asked what are the criteria for choosing for the OS on these devices: Lenovo sees predominately new users to date. (Although the world-wide economic slowdown is playing a role as well.) Their education customers are Linux-focused; consumers are asking for both. Qualcomm sees this as a new market—the best of the wireless world and the best of the laptop world—a new device. Samsung thinks the user wants something simple for the second PC—web browsing. The first-PC market is looking for "standard" systems (XP). ASUS is also splitting their strategy between emerging and mature markets. Everyone agreed that netbooks are not cannibalizing the traditional notebook market (but they are having an impact on price). But also everyone seems to be drifting towards larger screens, a hard disk, and Windows—along with a higher price. "10 inches is where the market is going." The retail market is asking for XP, but the professional and vertical markets, e.g., education are asking for Linux.

The follow-on panel was pretty depressing: Are netbooks mobile device or PC replacements. Mozilla opined always-on connectivity is essential, the browser is ''the'' application and nothing else is important, e.g., the OS doesn't matter and running non-web-based applications is "old think". In contradiction to this, "Linux has momentum and it is a place for innovation; you innovate because you can." [http://www.thinkgos.com/ gOS], who makes "Cloud", a Linux distribution that focuses on a browser, with an application "doc" in the browser. It is a "dual boot" machine, but the Linux distribution is instant on to a browser. Xandros argued that "Economics drives adoption of Linux from the OEM perspective"; but now there is a race in the application space. There is a 20-Euro difference in the OEM price between XP and Linux, but that is not enough to convince an OEM to switch away from the mainstream. The netbook started as a new type of device, but now it is marketed as a mini-laptop, which is why Windows is getting a larger market share: the consumer as consumer.

The final panel featured service providers. SFR (www.sfr.com) has its base of customers using their services for web access from mobile phones; they have recently expanded into the netbook (specifically, the eeePC market) by offering 3G connectivity. Comwax (www.comwax.com) offers a touch-based ("iPhone on a notebook") user experience—"always-on social networks" being the buzz phrase most often heard at the meeting. They tout lots of Sugar-like features: 1 click; unified contact list; and the seemingly ubiquitous application store. They'll be marketing through mobile carriers. gloBull (www.myglobull.com) focused their presentation on mobility and security. They have a secure boot that then launches a signed virtual environment—Windows or XP. (Sound familiar?)

A concluding presentation was given by IDC, a market research company, entitled "Netbook market opportunity: Hype or hope?" IDC believe that netbooks represent a big opportunity: 30 million units by 2012 (35% annual growth per year). (OLPC is only a very small consideration in their market projections. I guess they are playing wait and see if his prediction of 200 million XOs in 2009 running Windows will be realized.) Price and ease of use are considered the key contributions to the market share. (What does ease of use mean when we are talking about vanilla XP?) Intel and Microsoft have been very aggressive in marketing in EMEA (l'Europe, le Moyen-Orient (Middle East) et l'Afrique). In EMEA, the OS is rapidly switching to XP with big push in retail channels by Microsoft and 80% of shipments are to consumers as second laptops with laptop expectations for their netbooks. However, IDC sees one-to-one computing in education as a big opportunity—50% of all portable PCs sold to education by 2012 (but a small percentage of the overall netbook market). Telcos are beginning to enter the netbook market—in an effort to push mobile broadband. The netbook fits that role, with the added benefit that they pay a smaller subsidy per consumer. All of this is putting pricing pressure on traditional notebooks. The big surprise to me is the extent to which Europe is dominating the netbook market—I always thought they were a mobile phone culture.

The reception was held at the Paris Museum of Modern Art (MAM) where we had a private viewing of a Dufy retrospective and cocktails in the Matisse Room (See [http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3253/3075519670_5a008de2cb_b.jpg Dufy] and [http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3041/3075519684_b5940e9c23_b.jpg Matisse]).

----

Addendum:

I went to one last panel at the Open World Forum in Paris: Ensuring the sustainability of FLOSS developer communities and business ecosystems. The description looked promising: Research, education, industry, public bodies, end-users: how is FLOSS changing competition and cooperation behavior? What kind of governance and financial support are required to foster and optimize FLOSS ecosystems?

And the lineup of panelists seemed well chosen: Elmar Geese, Chairman, Linux Verband; Wang Huaimin, Professor, China National University of Defense Technology; Mike Milinkovich, Executive Director, Eclipse Foundation; Cedric Thomas, CEO, OW2 Consortium; and Anthony Wasserman, Executive Director, Center for Open Source Investigation, Carnegie Mellon Silicon Valley.

I should have spent the afternoon at Musée D'Orsay. These guys had absolutely nothing to say about anything. No insight into FLOSS, organization, community, or sustainability. Nor did they have an answer to a simple prepared question directed to them—how to communicate about FLOSS to potential "customers"? They answered with nothing more sophisticated than business-school-101 sound bites: "make a strong business case." Yeah, and... I asked them to get concrete and got more of the same: "know your customer's decision-making criteria." It could have been sales people from any industry up there. Maybe that is a sign that free software has matured to the point where it is just another commodity. Sure doesn't feel that way from the trenches. Or maybe it is an indication that free software is lacking strong leadership in the areas of business and marketing. That seems closer to the truth. I will have to look elsewhere—to the community—for inspiration.

----

2. Threads: There have been a number of interesting discussions on the lists this week:

* Luis Michelena and Daniel Ajoy have been in a dynamic discussion of new Turtle Art features driven by pedagogical features being voiced by teachers ([http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/olpc-sur/2008-November/001359.html] and [http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/olpc-sur/2008-November/001455.html])
* Tomeu Vizoso has blogged about his experience walking the teachers in Uruguay through the process of building a "mind map" activity ([http://blog.tomeuvizoso.net/2008/11/labyrinth-experience.html]).
* Martin Langhoff has started a thread in the laptop.org wiki regarding the school server Moodle design ([http://wiki.laptop.org/go/XS_Moodle_design XS Moodle design]).

3. Looking for a project?: Tomeu has posted notes from the Sugar Camp brainstorming session regarding collaboration features for Sugar Activities. Lots of opportunities to get your start developing in Sugar ([[Marketing Team/Events/Sugarcamp Boston 2008/Minutes#Items_from_the_roadmap_brainstorm|Roadmap Brainstorm]]).

4. Ouch: A harsh criticism of Sugar from a blogger can be found at
[http://learnonline.wordpress.com/2008/12/01/my-experience-with-olpc-in-tuvalu/ My experience with OLPC in Tuvalu]. I've extracted it in part below with some acknowledgements and rebuttals.

: List of things wrong with OLPCs Operating System:

: 1. The connectivity metaphor on start up is inappropriate for people in areas where connectivity is a long way away. The OLPC is more useful to people in Tuvalu as a device for games, media and typing before it is for connecting to the Internet, so the connectivity interface should not be the main focus at start up.

Why is the community metaphor inappropriate? It is available regardless of Internet connectivity—95% of the schools in Peru are off the Internet, and yet the children and their teachers can use Sugar to collaborate within the community. It makes a very efficient use of whatever Internet resources are available.

: 2. That said, we were using wireless connectivity in the Government building, but the OLPCs holding that connection was flaky. We had no trouble keeping a connection to the network on the Windows machines, but the OLPCs kept dropping. Placing a Wireless modem in the room with us seemed to help the situation. Another problem relating to connectivity was the amount of time some of the OLPCs took to connect. Some didn’t at all. All of them need clearer indication of progress in connecting.

Improved wireless stability remains a goal, but the situation is much improved from Sugar 0.71, which seems to be the version of Sugar being tested (See #4 below).

: 3. The pop up menu for the operating system is very frustrating and seems to be affected by processing. Sometimes it is slow to initiate and even slower to disappear. I think its better to use the key on the keyboard instead, and turn off the mouse over feature.

I will conject that this comment is in regard to the hover menus. They come up instantly from a right-mouse click. But this seemed not be discoverable in the first three hours of use. A keyboard shortcut may also be a good addition.

: 4. Need better preloaders for the software. When we clicked an icon the software takes a while to load. Sometimes the loader dialog that says “starting” would take too long to appear. The icon does appear in the pie chart indicating active applications, perhaps something in that graphic could more effectively illustrate it as loading.

The "pie chart" comment suggests that the evaluation was done on a very old version of Sugar—pre 0.82—which makes it somewhat irrelevant. Launch time is better, but we have a ways to go.

: 5. The browser must have tabbed browsing! If I missed where it was, then it is too hard to find. There was no right click option on any of the OLPC we were using, and I don’t know if there is meant to be. If the tabbed browsing relies on a right click then we were thwarted. Also, I think the browser needs work on its layout and features. The address bar takes up too much room and for some unknown reason wants to display the page name instead of the URL. The URL is for more useful in terms of information, and having to click into the address bar just to check the URL is just silly. The scroll bars are too small, and especially noticeable when managing a website with a scrolling window inside it, like the edit view of a wiki. We didn’t try any ajax, java or flash – but I hope they are good to go!

Tabs in the Browse Activity are still on the wish list. The full address is revealed if you click in the address bar—again, apparently not readily discoverable in the first 3 hours. Java and Flash are compatible with Sugar, but there may well be performance issues on the OLPC-XO.

: 6. I couldn’t work out how to manage files. I could download PDFs ok, but it was a bit of a fumble to display them, and I have no idea how to save them. I tried plugging in a USB but as far as I could tell, no new icon appeared offering me access, and nowhere in the browser of the PDF display could I find how to save the file to the USB.

The Browse Activity offers to open the Journal (where downloaded files are stored), but perhaps not in the older builds. The USB shows up in the Journal, but perhaps it should show up in the Frame as well, as a notification when it is inserted?

: 7. I wonder about the touch pad. I am used to using them and use the one on this Asus all the time, but seeing as the OLPCs are so ready to think outside the square, lets rethink the touch pad. If you didn’t have the touch pad, you could have so much more room for keys! Apart from supplying a small mouse (which is infinitely more easy to use) I wonder if the game controllers in the screen could substitute a mouse, as could smart use of the tab key. That little blue dial that IBM used in the middle of their keyboard had potential I thought.

We have more work to do on keyboard shortcuts, especially on non-OLPC hardware. As regards the OLPC-XO tablet, 'nough said.

: 8. I reckon the operating system and software should completely change, and I’d suggest something like what Asus has done. I can certainly appreciate the innovations that I’ve found so far, but the extreme difference between the OLPC and other OS is too great, and will affect the usefulness of the laptops… think of it like Vista.. you are causing stress and lock in by being so different. The OLPC is not the place to experiment if your primary objective is to offer people in poorer economies to access and exploit opportunities. Of course there is the new opportunity of servicing and administering the OLPCs themselves, but that’s hardly sustainable and I hope it wasn’t planned for!

Growing community and jobs around Sugar is an important part of the roadmap. But also providing a platform that enhances learning is our primary concern. We've not proved our case yet, but there is plenty of evidence that a vanilla XP-approach is not having a positve impact on learning and hence is truly not a wise investment—"unlimited potential", indeed.

=== Community jams, meet-ups, and meetings ===

5. FUDCon will be held at MIT (Cambridge, MA) 9–11 January. If you can attend, please *SIGN UP* on the wiki page: [http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FUDCon/FUDConF11 FUDConF11] and please recommend topics for the hackfest. [http://paul.frields.org/ Paul Frields] is available to answer any questions you may have.

6. Kevin Cole reports that video from the last OLPC Learning Club DC is available at [http://www.careercenter.arlington.k12.va.us/gctaa/xolaptop_bee_project.html xolaptop bee].

7. There will be a Skolelinux/Debian-Edu developer gathering in Trondheim, Norway 23–25 January 2009 (See [http://friprogramvareiskolen.no/Gathering/2009-01-Trondheim 2009-01 Trondheim]).

8. There will be a Python for Teachers workshop at [http://pycon.org Pycon] in Chicago in late March, 2009.

=== Tech Talk ===

9. SOAS: Simon Peter reports that he has updated Sbuntu (Sugar for Ubuntu Live USB) to Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex). This should resolve many issues that were present in the earlier version. ([http://dev.laptop.org/~probono/sbuntu/ Sbuntu]). Please report Sbuntu issues to Peter and issues related to usb-creator to [https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/usb-creator USB creator].

Morgan Collett has put some updated Sugar packages in the Ubuntu Sugar
Team's PPA: [https://launchpad.net/~sugarteam/+archive Sugar archive]. He is updating them to include support for Network Manager 0.7, so that Neighborhood View will support connecting to access points again.

=== Sugar Labs ===

10. Self-organizing map (SOM): Gary Martin has generated another SOM from the past week of discussion on the IAEP mailing list (Please see [[:Image:2008-November-22-28-som.jpg|SOM]]).

[[Category:Sugar Digest]]

Archive/Current Events/2008-11-25

2016-12-19T06:03:49Z

KachachanC:

Archive/Current Events/2008-11-04

2016-12-19T06:03:42Z

KachachanC:

{{Obsolete | Refer to https://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_Labs/Current_Events for latest current events}}
<noinclude>{{ GoogleTrans-en | es =show | bg =show | zh-CN =show | zh-TW =show | hr =show | cs =show | da =show | nl =show | fi =show | fr =show | de =show | el =show | hi =show | it =show | ja =show | ko =show | no =show | pl =show | pt =show | ro =show | ru =show | sv =show }}</noinclude>

=== Sugar Digest ===

1. Lima: Sugar was well represented in Peru this past week. Rafael Ortiz and Sebastian Silva organized a translation sprint at the [http://usmp.edu.pe University San Martin de Porres]. SJ Klein and C. Scott Ananian then joined them to run a Game Jam. The week culminated with a Freedom and Open Source Day, in which we were joined by many members of the Peruvian Free Software community, including Nicolas Valcárcel from the Ubuntu community. My talk at the conference was titled “What the learning community can learn from Free Software.” One of my slides made the point that sostenibilidad ≠ sustentabilidad. Both words translate into “sustainability” in English, but Dr. Arq. Guillermo E. Gonzolo from CEEMA in Argentina pointed out the subtle distinction to me—one that I find quite interesting: sostenibilidad is static; sustenabilidad is dynamic. Putting XP on laptops is about maintaining the status quo (sostenibilidad), while Linux, which is at the beginning rather than end of its life cycle is where the true “unlimited potential” can be found (sustenabildad). I'll post my slides on the wiki when I get a chance.

2. What would creating a Sugar Activity require from me and what benefits would it bring?
I was asked this two-part question from a software developer. The Sugar Almanac is a good starting point for answering the first part ([http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Sugar_Almanac Sugar Almanac]). The second part is complex and rather than giving a glib answer, I want to take some time to give it some thought. The obvious answer, the chance to touch the lives of hundreds of thousands of children, is OK, but I think we need to develop more of a case.

3. Deployment roadmap: David Farning is developing a deployment roadmap with the goal to make Sugar and Sugar Activities “freely and readily available to learners everywhere.” Sounds good to me. (See [[Deployment Team/Roadmap|Deployment Roadmap]]).

4. Sugar on a stick: Caroline Meeks has been maintaining a page in the wiki tracking our progress with developing a turnkey USB key solution for schools (See [[Deployment Team/School_Key|School Key]]
).

5. Printing: Printing was hotly debated on the Sugar list ([http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/sugar/2008-October/009403.html Printing]). There were two discussions: Should Sugar support printing and How should Sugar support printing. It seems that there is not consensus on the first question—it isn't clear that there needs to be. (Printing is not a realistic option in the Peru deployment, but that shouldn't preclude its use in other places, necessarily. To me, the most compelling argument in favor of printing that was put forth is it lets you put the work of the students on display.) As to how to do it, there is the question of what affordances we should be providing (in which Activities) and whether or not we should be supporting network printing vs the installation of print drivers. The latter question is more of a distribution question than one for Sugar to resolve.

6. Feedback from Peruvian Ministry of Education: C. Scott Ananian and I made multiple visits to the MEC office in Lima to discuss Sugar 0.82 and the OLPC XO deployment. We got some great feedback, including a healthy list of bugs, one of the most pressing being that audio files are seemingly not importing properly when trying to create a new game in the Memorize Activity. The reason this is important is that Memorize is a nice tool introducing letter and word sounds to new readers. Another bug—or point of confusion—was in regard to how the Record Activity is saved to the Journal. Record sessions and photos created by Record both show up when doing an image search in the Journal. This is fine when in browsing within the Journal itself, but caused confusion when trying to import an image into Write. If you tried to import a session instead of a photo, the import failed.

It was nice to hear that was there was a distinct impression (from the user perspective) that “it is faster!!” In general the new Home View was well received: One simple idea we explored together was the use of the list view “star” option to restrict the number of Activity icons appearing on the Home View. This lets a teacher focus the class on a small set of Activities related to the goals being set for the students. It may be possible to have different collections of Activities tagged in the Journal for easy maintenance of such a scheme.

The pedagogical team at the ministry has been developing some beautiful curricula guides for Sugar. They describe projects that encompass multiple activities towards a common goal, such as creating a newspaper or a story about your community. The guides are targeting different skill levels and they beautifully illustrate pedagogical goals without being overly prescriptive. The multi-page guides are intended for teachers. Single-page instructions are also being created for students. As they complete a few more, they will make them available for downloading.

7. ¿Qué? ¿Cómo? ¿Por qué? ¿Para qui?: We also discussed the role that a portfolio might play in Sugar. What? How? Why? For who? are questions that are part of the teacher/student discourse in Peru. They are also questions that are important to the “select-reflect-perform” cycle of portfolio assessment. Scott, Rafael, Sebastian and I spend quite a bit of time discussion possible approaches to building a Portfolio Activity (we agreed that it makes sense to make it a separate Activity from the Journal for the time being). My hair-brained idea is to make a Turtle-Art-like snap-together programing Activity to create narrative presentations from items selected from the Journal. I'll make some sketches in the coming days and post them to the wiki. The team at the ministry was very upbeat about portfolio tools, regardless of the implementation details.

8. Thin and fat clients: Brendan R. Powers from [http://www.resara.com Resara] has taken an interest in Sugar. Resara deploys Linux desktop solutions in schools in the United States. Brendon believes that Sugar's collaboration tools, Journal and other features “could be very appealing to younger grade (elementary and middle school) students and teachers.” We'll be exploring how to use Sugar on some of the classrooms already on their thin client desktops.

9. On collaboration: Juliano Bittencourt has stirred the pot regard the Sugar collaboration model. In a discussion on the developers mailing list ([http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/devel/2008-October/020588.html On collaboration]) he raises the issue of synchronous vs asynchronous collaboration, arguing that too much emphasis has been given over to the former, when the latter is generally more useful in a school setting. I agree with him to a great extent. There are not too many learning scenarios that I am aware of where a tightly coupled synchronous interaction is critical. Exceptions of course include Chat—which can be used as a group storytelling medium and an medium through which other collaborations are staged and organized—and include some of the activities around real-time picture sharing and other data-gathering exercises, such as the use of Measure or Distance. Etoys also has a number synchronous modes that are rich, including the ability to share both objects and a workspace. The peer-to-peer editing in the Write Activity may not require synchrony: children could trade documents, edit, and then pass them back. But the feature has been used creatively for other narrative purposes. And of course, there are lots of great games that require some level of synchrony, so the effort that has gone into this layer of the infrastructure will continue to be of value.

To some extent, Juliano's point was less in regard to synchrony and more in regard to the lack of any means within Sugar to maintain persistence of a collaboration over a longer time frame than a single interactive session. This omission is will in part be filled by services external to Sugar, such as Moodle or AMADIS. However, some aspects of the yet-to-be-implemented Bulletin Board would also meet these needs. (Better versioning in the Journal/Datastore—in the roadmap for 0.84—will play a role as well.) The Bulletin Board is designed to be a place for the persistent sharing of objects and actions between a group of collaborators. In some sense, one could think of it as a share, persistent clipboard. Bulletin Boards would be created in support of group projects that involve multiple activities and multiple sessions. We should develop a requirements document and architectural description of what is needed in order to both best leverage existing tools and set realistic goals for any Sugar developments.

10. PlayGo: Paul Barchilon provided some very thoughtful feedback on the PlayGo Activity. What struck me was that he kept returning to how various design decisions impact the opportunity for children to engage in learning (See [http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/games/2008-October/000743.html PlayGo feedback]).

=== Community jams, meetups, and meetings ===

11. Lima translation sprint: We gathered at the University of San Martin de Porres for two intense days. Through the courtesy of the OLPC foundation, Sugar Labs, and USMP, we had the opportunity to meet for a few days of translation work. Rafael Ortiz and Sebastian Silva provided the logistical support. We worked shoulder to shoulder alongside community volunteers, as well as a team distributed collaborators who made their contributions both at headquarters at the university and via the Internet from different parts of Peru.

The distance work was made possible by our infrastructure collaboration, IRC, mailing lists, and especially the parallel translation tool available in FLOSS Manuals, which allows you to drag and drop text and images between documents. One challenge we had was to regenerate many of the screenshots of Sugar containing text in English. (There is more work to do.)

The team would like to take this opportunity to thank Sr. Hernan Pachas and Engineer Waldy Grandez of University San Martin de Porres for all their help in organizing the event, publicity, support, snacks and Peruvian entertainment. See our work in [http://translate.flossmanuals.net/bin/view/Sugar_es Sugar_es] and please lend a hand in completing the work.

=== Tech Talk ===

12. NetworkManager 0.7: Marco Pesenti Gritti and Simon Schampijer worked on porting Sugar to NetworkManager 0.7. They made lots of progress and now have something “sort of” functional. They still need to get security handling in shape (e.g., WEP), implement settings persistence and reimplement frame devices. (Someone also need to port our mesh patches to 0.7 before we can add UI for them.)

13. Developer tools: Marco started writing some release automation scripts and wrote a script to a mock build of sugar-jhbuild for easier testing on the OLPC XO-1 laptop. He switched jhbuild and buildbot away from Fedora 8 and Ubuntu 7.04 as the glib they provide is now too old. And he managed to get new SLiM (a simple login manager) into Fedora Rawhide. We need to build a new LiveCD with selinux enabled. Next week Marco plans to mark existing public API as stable/unstable/deprecated, get activities rpms reviewed, and create a new LiveCD.

14. Sugar improvements: Marco investigated Browse/Firefox memory issues and posted a summary on the mailing lists. Kernel hackers help needed! He also finished up a zoom-levels refactoring: He got rid of the annoying flickering. He and Tomeu Vizoso have been looking into drawing performance. They plan to start seriously working on performance next week. Marco also did some shell code refactoring.

15. XOCamp: Marco has written three proposals for the November XOCamp. (I am working on one for the Portfolio as well.) There are many more being posted on the Sugar and Devel lists.

16. Gentoo: Aleksey Lim has posted instructions for building Sugar on Gentoo (See [[Community/Distributions/Gentoo
|Gentoo]]).

17. Ejabberd: Jonas Smedegaard reports that Ejabberd has had the patches applied for some time now on Debian. In other words, “the next stable release of Debian will support Sugar out of the box.” So will the next release of Ubuntu (Intrepid) due to release this week, as they borrow these patches from Debian (Morgan Collett has written up the much simpler process of getting ejabberd up and running at [http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Installing_ejabberd/deb Installing ejabberd on Debian]).

18. Gnash: Rob Savoye has new rpms for Gnash available for testing (“for the brave at heart”).

#!/bin/sh
# install livna
sudo yum http://rpm.livna.org/livna-release-9.rpm

# install ffmpeg from livna
sudo yum install -y ffmpeg

# get rid of the old build of 0.8.3
sudo rpm -ev gnash gnash-plugin

# install gnash
sudo rpm -iv \
http://www.getgnash.org/packages/snapshots/fedora/gnash-20081025-1.i386.rpm

# install the plugin
sudo rpm -iv \
http://www.getgnash.org/packages/snapshots/fedora/gnash-plugin-20081025-1.i386.rpm

19. Other software releases this week include:
* TurtleArt-13.xo
* HablarConSara-1.xo

=== Sugar Labs ===

20. Self-organizing map (SOM): Gary Martin has generated another SOM from the past week of discussion on the IAEP mailing list (Please see [[:Image:2008-October-18-24-som.jpg|SOM]]).

[[Category:Sugar Digest]]

Archive/Current Events/2009-01-13

2016-12-19T06:03:36Z

KachachanC:

Archive/Current Events/2008-10-20

2016-12-19T06:03:31Z

KachachanC:

Archive/Current Events/2008-06-29

2016-12-19T06:03:29Z

KachachanC:

{{Obsolete | Refer to https://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_Labs/Current_Events for latest current events}}
<noinclude>{{GoogleTrans-en}}</noinclude>

=== Sugar Digest ===

1. Latest Sucrose: The new [[0.82/0.81.3 Notes|Sucrose]] 0.81.3 Development Release is now available. The release has some new features, including: Manual reordering of the Home view icons; a freeform layout of the Home view icons; improved feedback on activity startup; support for custom certificates in Browse; alt+tab activity switching; etc. We are now in feature freeze, so the short-term focus will be on testing, bug triaging and fixes. The community has done a great job in that we achieved practically all the features that we had targeted. Thanks to everyone that made this possible and special kudos to the Sugar release team.

Detailed release notes can be found in the wiki (Please see [[0.82/0.81.3 Notes]]); a sugar-jhbuild branch for the release can be found here (http://dev.laptop.org/git?p=sugar-jhbuild;a=shortlog;h=sucrose-0.81.3).

With the release of 0.81.3 we will be in feature freeze ([[Development Team/Release#Feature_freeze]]): this affects all of the modules included in the release. To request an exception, which will be exceptional, please send mail to sugar at laptop.org, copying release-team at sugarlabs.org; please include the patches you would like to land. For string changes please also copy localization at lists.laptop.org.

2. Making the installation of Activities easier: Dave Farning is working on a web interface to managing activities based upon Mozilla's AMO codebase (addons.mozilla.org). He has successfully used AMO on a local server to install activities on an XO-1 laptop and to install Sugar on a conventional laptop. He has started submitting a series of patches upstream to Mozilla.org with the goal that SugarLabs will be able to use the AMO codebase as maintained by Moxilla. A few areas that require work: (a) Look and feel – applying the sugarlabs stylesheets; (b) Applications – currently, AMO hardcodes application data rather than handled dynamically; (c) Addontypes – AMO can handle several addontypes such as extension, plugins, and and dictionaries, but they are not yet handled dynamically. By modularizing how AMO handles applications and add-on types, we should be able to drop in Sugar application and and addontype code.

The work flow for a developer would be:
* Activity authors register their activity with AMO;
* author uploads latest release into sandbox;
* reviewer verifies new upload works correctly and publishes the upload.

From the user perspective, Activities would then be browseable and downloadable in a manner similar to any Firefox plugin, with very fast, secure, and scalable updates.

Dave is looking for help (the code is being put in https://www.develer.com/gitweb/pub?p=users/dfarning/w.s.o.git;a=summary).

In parallel, there has also been a discussion on the Sugar list regarding development of an activity for updating Sugar and Sugar Activities.

3. courses.sugarlabs.org: David Van Assche is setting up a Moodle installation at http://courses.sugarlabs.org to complement activities.sugarlabs.org. It will house stable versions of activities, together with lesson plans, relevant reading materials, and related activities. The OLE Nepal team, with help from Bernie Innocenti, who is in Kathmandu for the summer, will be fleshing out the site. Please contribute.

4. Usability testing: Carlos Mauro Cárdenas Fernández has begun a pilot usability test of Sugar on the Intel Classmate PC (Please see http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Projects/TestUsabilityOLPC for some details of his plans and initial findings).

=== Community jams and meetups ===

5. Porto Alegre, Brazil: Juliano Bittencourt from Laboratório de Estudos Cognitivos reports that a GameJam was held at FISL 9.0, the largest Latin America free software conference. A short video made during the event is available on YouTube (Please see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oWKBdeZUtq0). A team from the Argentian PyGame group was the winner: a game called Falabranaman.

===Tech Talk===

6. Infrastructure: Marco Pesenti Gritti has started a page on the wiki about infrastructure ([[Infrastructure Team/Roadmap]]) and is seeking your feedback.

7. Journal: Tomeu Vizoso reports that a new version of the Journal activity has been released, with many translation updates and some visual fixes (Download it from http://dev.laptop.org/pub/sugar/sources/journal-activity/journal-activity-92.tar.bz2). New features include:
* Add indications for empty Journal and empty search results (Eben Eliason)
* Translation update for Italian (Carlo Falciola)
* Fix appearance of "no preview" (Eben Eliason)
* Translation update for Khmer (Rit Lim)
* Translation update for Haitian Creole (Diksyone Ayisyen)
* Translation update for German (Markus Schlager)
* Translation update for Marathi (Rupali Sarode)
* Translation update for French (Samy Boutayeb)
* Adapt object chooser to new designs. Some refactoring was needed (Tomeu)
* Adapt UI to right-to-left scripts (Khaled Hosny)

8. Datastore: Tomeu also reports that a new version of the datastore has been released (http://dev.laptop.org/pub/sugar/sources/sugar-datastore/sugar-datastore-0.8.2.tar.bz2). New features include a metadata copy outside the index.

9. USB key boot: The CD-image of the recent XO-LiveCD (Version 080607) contains a script to copy the data on a USB key and make it bootable:
* mount the CD (or ISO-image) on a computer running Linux;
* open a console (shell) and go into the directory tools/;
* insert a usb memory device and
* run the command ./make_usbstick.sh -d <block-device> -m <cd-mount-point>
Hint: ./make_usbstick.sh -h provides more detailed documentation. Please contact Wolfgang Rohrmoser if you have any questions (WolfgangRohrmoser at web.de).

10. Char 41: Morgan Collett has released Chat 41 (Please see http://dev.laptop.org/pub/sugar/sources/chat-activity/Chat-41.tar.bz2 and http://dev.laptop.org/~morgan/bundles/Chat-41.xo). New features include:
* Updated translations: mr, de, ht, km, es, it;
* #6036: Add separator after old chat history;
* #6298: Implement 1-1 private chat with non Sugar Jabber clients.
Morgan also updated the Presence Service with the changes required for non-Sugar Jabber clients to chat with OLPC XO-1 laptops.

11. Fedora 9: Daniel Drake reports that the following packages may make the Fedora-9 build experience a little more bearable:
* a NetworkManager that can actually connect to networks (http://dev.laptop.org/~dsd/NetworkManager-0.6.5-0.11.svn3246.olpc3.i386.rpm);
* fixed keyboard – arrow keys, Alt-Gr and other functionality (http://dev.laptop.org/~dsd/xorg-x11-server-Xorg-1.4.99.901-29.20080415.fc9.i386.rpm)

12. Alt-Tab: Benjamin Berg submitted a number of patches to update Alt-Tab behavior for switching between activities.

13. Measure activity: Arjun Sarwal has been working upon 'Sound' and 'Sensor' contexts within Measure and also, adding a textbox at the bottom that mentions details about the signal/sound input (Please view a screenshot at http://crank.laptop.org/~arjs/sound_sensors.png). Arjun has also been working on a new re-organized wiki page for Measure (Please see http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Measure/New_temp). Suggestions and contributions are very welcome.

14. Home view: Tomeu Visozo has implemented a Home view user interface that allows the user to "drag and drop" activities to desired locations on the screen (freeform) rather than restricting them to the circle. Other activities move nicely out of the way if you try to drop one on top of another.

15. Patches: Marco Pesenti Gritti reviewed patches and more patches. He also packaged xulrunner 1.9 final and adapted the Browse activity to it. Finally he coordinated the Sugar 0.81.3 release and made big progresses on a Fedora 9 based Sugar liveCD. (Note that xulrunner 1.9 final is the version used in Firefox 3, which provides much better memory use than previous versions.)

16. Sugar Almanac: Faisal Anwar of Media Modifications has made progress on an online "Sugar Almanac" of best practices and working code snippets (Please see http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Sugar.activity.activity).

17. Etoys: Bert Freudenberg reports a new etoys release (Please see http://dev.laptop.org/pub/sugar/sources/etoys/etoys-3.0.2029.tar.gz and http://dev.laptop.org/pub/sugar/sources/etoys-activity/etoys-activity-83.tar.gz ; the bundled versions cab be found at http://etoys.laptop.org/rpms/etoys-3.0.2007-1.noarch.rpm and http://etoys.laptop.org/rpms/Etoys-83.xo). Improvements include: Pango fixes (tested with Nepalese), new DBus bindings, updated QuickGuides, a few more strings made translatable.

18. Statistics: ohloh also has some statistics on the Sugar software:
* http://www.ohloh.net/projects/9605/analyses/latest
* http://www.ohloh.net/projects/11601/analyses/latest
* http://www.ohloh.net/projects/sugar-presence-service/analyses/latest
* http://www.ohloh.net/projects/11526/analyses/latest
* http://www.ohloh.net/projects/11636/analyses/latest

=== Sugar Labs ===

19. Self-organizing map (SOM): Gary Martin has generated another SOM from the past week of discussion on the IAEP mailing list (Please see [[:Image:2008-June-14-20-som.jpg]]). The list was relatively quite this week, considering all of the progress, so the map is not very informative – the data being sparse.

[[Category:Sugar Digest]]

Archive/Current Events/2008-08-11

2016-12-19T06:03:20Z

KachachanC:

Archive/Current Events/2008-10-06

2016-12-19T06:03:15Z

KachachanC:

Archive/Current Events/2008-07-14

2016-12-19T06:03:09Z

KachachanC:

Archive/Current Events/2008-07-21

2016-12-19T06:03:04Z

KachachanC:

Archive/Current Events/2008-10-13

2016-12-19T06:02:54Z

KachachanC:

Archive/Current Events/2008-07-28

2016-12-19T06:02:49Z

KachachanC:

Archive/Current Events/2008-09-02

2016-12-19T06:02:42Z

KachachanC:

Archive/Current Events/2008-09-30

2016-12-19T06:02:14Z

KachachanC:

Archive/Current Events/2008-09-15

2016-12-19T05:57:57Z

KachachanC:

{{Obsolete | Check https://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_Labs/Current_Events for latest current events}}
<noinclude>{{GoogleTrans-en}}</noinclude>

=== Sugar Digest ===

1. Oversight Board: The Sugar Labs Oversight Board meet on Friday (See [[Oversight Board/Minutes#Friday_5_September_2008_-_14.00_.28UTC.29|minutes]]). The bulk of the discussion was in regard to the formation of committees: David Farning will organize/liaison with the Membership committee; Greg Dekoenigsberg will organize/liaison with the Events committee; Bernie Innocenti will organize/liaison with the Infrastructure committee; Simon Schampijer will organize/liaison with the Test committee; I will organize/liaison with the Deployment committee. Please contact us if you have interested in participating on one of these committees. The next meeting will be Friday, 19 September at 14:00 UTC (10 AM EST) on irc.freenode.net #sugar-meeting—please join us.

2. Study on the impact of ICT on educational outcomes: I spent an hour on phone with Nitika Tolani-Brown, a Research Analyst with the International Development Program at the American Institutes for Research. She and her colleagues are "conducting a comprehensive analysis of reliable research undertaken to date on the deployment of low-cost ICT to support education goals around the world with an emphasis on the developing world. The purpose of the study is to increase understanding of the impact of ICT on educational outcomes in children and adults and, ultimately, to generate an innovative research agenda to address salient issues." We discussed Sugar Labs, its goals and the status of the various Sugar deployments around the world. They are keen to get more input for their report. Feel free to contact Nitika (ntolani-brown AT air.org) or visit http://www.ictimpact.org with your thoughts on "current projects as they relate to the use of ICT in educational settings within developing countries, any evaluations conducted on these projects (or evaluations of other projects that you may know of), as well as your perceptions on the challenges users and developers of ICT solutions face and the future of this field." Their report will be posted publicly towards the end of the calendar year.

3. Field reports: There have been some brief reports coming in from Sugar trials, notably Rodolfo Pilas's report on the olpc-sur list ([http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/olpc-sur/2008-September/000614.html olcp-sur]) and Waveplace blog ([http://waveplace.com/news/blog/ waveplace blog]). Any and all feedback is enormously valuable: please speak up.

4. Regional Sugar development teams: There are several regional initiatives in the formative stages that are looking for feedback in terms of how to best structure themselves. In an effort to increase the level of participation in the developing world, it is being proposed to build local teams to work full time on the further development and support of Sugar as a vehicle both for advancing the opportunity for a quality education for the children of the region and to create a viable community around free and open-source software, a major movement internationally that is fueling innovative technology and economic growth, but that has yet to take root in much of the developing world. Local groups are seeking funding for three years, after which they expect to have a self-sustaining enterprise that also serves as a focal point for entrepreneurship and job creation. Any input on how to best structure such initiatives and from whence to seek funding would be appreciated.

=== Community jams and meetups ===

5. FUDCon Brno 2008: Christoph Derndorfer reports from Brno that Sugar Labs had a strong presence at FUDCon (attending were Tomeu Vizoso, Marco Pesenti Gritti, Simon Schampijer, Bernie Innocenti—freshly back after 2 1/2 months of volunteering at OLE Nepal—Daniel Jahre, Christoph Derndorfer, and Greg deKoenigsberg). A presentation which focused on the Sugar platform, Sugar Labs and especially how the Fedora community can support the ongoing efforts was held at Saturday's barcamp. In addition Tomeu, Marco, Simon and Bernie spent a lot of time refining the 0.84 roadmap and feature plan. There were also many lively discussions about the current state of Sugar / Sugar Labs and many ideas, plans and to-dos for the weeks and months ahead were written down. They will be posted on the IAEP mailing-list and appropriate places in the wiki once everyone has recovered from [http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FUDCon/FUDConBrno2008 FUDCon].

=== Tech Talk ===

6. Sucrose: Simon Schampijer reports that the Sugar release team has released the [[0.82/0.82.1 Notes|Sucrose 0.82.1]] stable release. Owners of an XO can test it in in latest joyride or the stable 8.2 branch >= 758.

7. Sugarbot: Zach Riggle reports progress on Sugarbot, a GUI automation utility for the automating the testing of Sugar Activities. Sugarbot supports continuous integration with Buildbot, so that multiple platforms and host configurations may be tested seamlessly; developers can more readily perform regression testing on their Activities, enhancing reliability and efficiency. A [http://code.google.com/p/sugarbot/downloads/detail?name=ScreenCast2.mp4&can=2&q=#makechanges screencast] of Sugarbot is available, as well as the [http://code.google.com/p/sugarbot/ package].

8. Beagleboard: Koen Kooi reports that the basics (sugar, sugar-base, sugar-toolkit, sugar-presence-services and sugar-artwork) are now running on the beagleboard (See [http://www.angstrom-distribution.org/sugar-running-ångström sugar-running-ångström]).

9. X: Bert Freudenberg wrote the long-awaited X Activity (See http://wiki.laptop.org/go/X_Activity and download it from [http://wiki.laptop.org/images/b/b4/X-1.xo X-1.xo]). Thus Sugar now supports an X11 desktop as an Activity that can run regular X11 applications.

10. Testing: There has been great feedback from various individuals and teams testing Sugar and Sugar Activities, including the "Wellington testers", Gary Martin, Douglas Ridgway, "Team Perú", and Mikus Grinbergs. Many thanks for your efforts.

11. FLOSS Manuals: The manuals for a number of Sugar Activities are now published (including manuals for [http://en.flossmanuals.net/write_activity Write], [http://en.flossmanuals.net/terminal Terminal], [http://en.flossmanuals.net/chat Chat], [http://en.flossmanuals.net/browse Browse], [http://en.flossmanuals.net/record Record], and [http://en.flossmanuals.net/turtleart TurtleArt]). Please help us improve these manuals by going to http://en.flossmanuals.net/write where the editable versions reside. Note that we are including tutorials and notes to parents and teachers as part of the documentation effort. Helping expanding these sections would be greatly appreciated.

=== Sugar Labs ===

12. Self-organizing map (SOM): Gary Martin has generated another SOM from the past week of discussion on the IAEP mailing list (Please see [[:Image:2008-August-30-September-5-som.jpg|SOM]]).

[[Category:Sugar Digest]]

Archive/Current Events/2008-08-25

2016-12-19T05:57:20Z

KachachanC:

Archive/Current Events/2008-08-05

2016-12-19T05:57:15Z

KachachanC:

{{Obsolete | Check https://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_Labs/Current_Events for latest current events}}
<noinclude>{{GoogleTrans-en}}</noinclude>

=== Sugar Digest ===

1. Award-winning: We can start referring to Sugar as "award-winning software." It earned a silver medal in the International Design Excellence Awards '08 and was undoubtedly one of the reasons the OLPC XO-1 laptop won the gold medal (Please see [http://www.idsa.org/IDEA_Awards/gallery/2008/award_details.asp?ID=772 IDEA_Awards]).

2. Outreach: Dave Farning has been developing a road map for outreach to various communities (apparently we already have the attention of the design community; maybe our next award will be from the education community). Specifically, he suggests that we:

* Engage the package maintainers for the various Linux distributions
** Make sure they are aware of Sugar;
** Help build a community within each distribution to packages Sugar and Sugar Activities;
** Help expand the community to include testers, developers, and translators.

* Engage education-focused distributions
** Make sure they are aware of Sugar;
** Make sure they are aware of the Sugar packaging efforts (either .deb or .rpm);
** Help expand the community to include testers, developers, and translators.

* Engage the education community
** Make sure they are aware of Sugar;
** Help expand the community to include testers, developers, and translators;
** Help expand the community to include development of pedagogy; models of use; etc.

Dave reports our progress to date:

* We are working with Fedora, Debian, and Ubuntu and are working towards a basic set of stable packages for their distributions;
* We are in the initial stage of identifying and establishing contact with eduction distributions (Please help us);
* Outside of the OLPC deployments, we are still in the initial stage of identifying and establishing contact with education communities (Again, your help is needed here--we want to establish a "bottom-up" approach to compliment the OLPC top-down efforts).

3. "Congratulations! but Sugar sucks": As we near code freeze for Sucrose 8.2, Ben Schwartz has identified six areas in need of improvement. In a thread with a somewhat unfortunate subject field, these are discussed as candidate areas we should focus on for the next release (Please see http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/sugar/2008-July/007390.html). The discussion begs the question of how Sugar Labs can rise above day-to-day deployment headaches in order to ensure that there is a solid foundation being built. A model I have been advocating for Sugar Labs is as the place where the goals and architecture for Sugar are established. The community, of course, vets those goals, critiques the architecture, and provides the means of achieving those goals.

4. "Kid contributions": John Gilmore started a discussion bemoaning the fact that as far as we know, there have not yet been any patches to Sugar submitted by a child (Please see http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/sugar/2008-July/007349.html). My response to John was:
* we need better tools for software development on the XO (Jameson Chema Quinn has been making some progress on the Develop activity—see below);
* while the children have not yet been making modification to the Sugar codebase, there is evidence of a cultural shift in schools using Sugar that is synergistic with the ideals of appropriation of not just software, but of ideas. Not a bad start.

5. OEMs: Are we ready to start contacting OEMs? (There are a number of new products being announced in the low-cost laptop space. How do we ensure that Sugar is an option for these products?)

6. Physics: Edward Cherlin has proposed we "start a physics textbook project combining Measure, Etoys, SciPy, and all of the low-cost instruments we can come up with" (Please see http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/sugar/2008-July/007269.html).

=== Community jams and meetups ===

7. Physics game jam: Brian Jordangi is organizing a physics game-jam competition in Boston, MA the weekend of August 29.

8. FLOSS Manual sprint: Anne Gentile is organizing an OLPC/Sugar FLOSS Manuals book sprint in Austin, TX at the end of next month.

===Tech Talk===

9. Sugar-jhbuild: I finally managed to get my xsessions configured so that I could run both Sugar as installed by apt-get sugar and the latest jpyride version I built by hand using sugar-jhbuild (Please see [[Development Team/Jhbuild#Creating_an_xsession_for_Sugar-jhbuild|xsession]] for the details).

10. Sugar appliance: Bryan Kearney has built a Sugar appliance based upon the Thincrust toolkit (Please see [http://www.thincrust.net Thincrust] where you'll learn that "an appliance is a pre-configured application and operating system bundle"). The directions for using the appliance are:
# Download http://sugar.s3.amazonaws.com/sugarAppliance.tar.gz
# Unzip and untar it
# Run virt-image sugar.xml
# At the login, select "Autologin"

11. Develop: Jameson Chema Quinn has made a new version of Develop (Please see [[olpc:Develop|Develop]]). Jameson recommends you use a recent Joyride (> 2170).

12. Road-map updates: Marco Pesenti Gritti announced that letting the code freeze for this release slip. "With the current speed of development of the OLPC release it would just be impractical." Marco has
started a tentative 0.84 schedule (Please see [[0.84]]).

Marco is finally back working full time on OLPC. He spent this week fixing blocker bugs for the next release, doing a lot of triage and several patch reviews. He implemented an improved logic handling new windows in the Browse activity, which, while not yet ideal, should allow all the web sites that Uruguay has had problems with to work correctly. Marco also tracked down and fixed an infinite loop in the shell. Finally, with Tomeu Vizoso, he solved a problem with the web widget size allocation, which is likely to have caused several problems.

13. Sucrose Release Candidate 1: The new Sucrose 0.81.5 Development Release is out. Thanks to all the contributors! Simon Schampijer reports that we now have one more release before code freeze (excluding more changes to the road map). Please test, give feedback, and file bugs (Please see [[0.82/0.81.5 Notes|Sucrose 81.5]]).

Simon has been implementing a mechanism for feedback from 'Register' process in the form of an alert that is displayed in the Home view.

14. Computer vision: Nirav Patel is soliciting feedback regarding what computer vision should it be in regard to "gaming, input, accessibility, education, or anything else" (Please see http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/games/2008-July/000664.html). He gives some examples at http://eclecti.cc/olpc.

15. Etoys: Takashi Yamamiya reports that there is new release of Etoys, which includes Tubes, a Pango speed-up, and a fix to the clipboard.

* [http://dev.laptop.org/pub/sugar/sources/etoys/etoys-3.0.2059.tar.gz etoys-3.0.2059.tar.gz]
* [http://dev.laptop.org/pub/sugar/sources/etoys-activity/etoys-activity-85.tar.gz etoys-activity-85.tar.gz]
* [http://etoys.laptop.org/rpms/squeak-vm-3.10-3olpc6.i386.rpm squeak-vm-3.10-3olpc6.i386.rpm]

=== Sugar Labs ===

16. Infrastructure: Bernie Innocenti reports that on Monday, the following services were moved to Solarsail:
* mailing lists
* wiki.sugarlabs.org
* email aliases forwarding

Additional services that we might want to migrate from dev.laptop.org include:
* git
* trac
* the sugar@ mailing list
* wiki pages related to Sugar
* pootle

We decided to wait moving these until we get the full backups running and the machine racked in its final home.

Services still hosted by develer.com include:
* api.sugarlabs.org
* courses.sugrlabs.org
* developer accounts
* nameservers
* user drop box for downloads.sugarlabs.org

The above services will go on our second machine as soon if we get it racked. Develer is glad to keep them as long as needed.

Thanks to Bernie and Ivan Krstić.

17. Self-organizing map (SOM): Gary Martin has generated another SOM from the past week of discussion on the IAEP mailing list (Please see [[:Image:2008-July-19-25-som.jpg]]). The verbs are prominent: doing; programming; learning; and education; math; etc.

[[Category:Sugar Digest]]