Archive/Current Events/2009-03-31

Sugar Digest

I have been buried in meetings over the past few days, so I am a bit late in giving an update to the Sugar community.

First, I want to wish Rafael Enrique Ortiz Guerrero (dirakx) a rapid recovery.

While I have been distracted, lots of great work has been happening: the Sugar on a Stick team is making great progress on the Fedora-11 port; the OLPC Learning Club held a pivotal meeting where they reached consensus about forming a Sugar Labs DC; progress is also being made in regard to a Sugar Lab in Peru; the Release Team has been cleaning a few outstanding bugs in 0.84.1; the community has been busy helping potential Google Summer of Code applicants refine their proposals; Sascha Silbe has been setting up a build farm for Sugar Labs; the Marketing Team has been reaching out to hundreds of more journalists about our new release; the Localization Team has been migrating the Pootle infrastructure to a new server; the Wiki Team has done a reorganization of the wiki in concert with the move away from CamelCase; and Sugar and Sugar Activities continue to be improved. A busy week.

The big news is that thanks to the efforts of Jameson Quinn and Mel Chua, we have been accepted into Google Summer of Code 2009. We need to solicit and encourage as many great project proposals as we can in the next few days (applications are due April 3): the more students who apply to our program, the better our chances of getting more slots assigned. Please direct potential applicants to Summer_of_Code/Student_application_template and Development Team/Project Ideas.

Thank you to everyone who has been answering student questions on IRC and on the mailing list.

Tomeu Vizoso beat me to the punch by blogged about the great contributions being made by community members (See http://blog.tomeuvizoso.net/2009/03/what-keeps-me-going-on.html). One crude measure of the growing ranks of contributors is the steadily increasing number of people on #sugar on irc.freenode.net. We have been hovering around 100 lately. It is great to see both the continuity of long-standing contributors and the newcomers. The extent to which the veterans are being supportive of the newcomers (and my own barrage of naive questions) is a nice reflection on the project as a whole.

Tech Talk

We had in impromptu meeting on IRC to discuss the outstanding issues in regard to future Fedora/Sugar support for the OLPC XO-1. The list of work items is shorter than I would have thought and many of these items already have teams of people working on them. We discussed as a reasonable target being able to release these items in time for Fedora 12.

1. mesh
2. activation security
3. Rainbow (activity security)
4. activity update control panel
5. power management
6. library for browsing content bundles
7. automatic display/keyboard language setting
8. special keys on the keyboard (brightness, audio, ..)
9. using USB keys in the Journal
10. olpc-update
11. customization key
12. lease security
13. UL warning screen at shutdown

Tony Forster continues to work magic with Turtle Art (See http://tonyforster.blogspot.com/2009/03/turtle-fileview.html).

There is a new Sugar tutorial project (Please see http://tutorius.org/blog/the-first-iteration/).

Martin Langhoff announced the availability of XS-0.5.2 this week.

http://xs-dev.laptop.org/xs/

"It fixes 3 bugs, the most notable one being the ejabberd @online@ roster issue."

Sebastian Dziallas has made a new Sugar on a Stick snapshot available at

http://download.sugarlabs.org/soas/snapshots/2/Soas2-200903211320.iso

and a virtual appliance image at

http://download.sugarlabs.org/soas/appliances/soas2-20090321.tar.gz

Please test them.

Sugar Labs

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