Changes

This page is updated each week (usually on Monday morning) with notes from the Sugar Labs community. (The digest is also sent to the community-news at sugarlabs.org list and blogged at [http://walterbender.org/ walterbender.org].) If you would like to contribute, please send email to [[User:walter|walter]] at sugarlabs.org by the weekend. (Also visit <span class="plainlinks">[http://planet.sugarlabs.org planet.sugarlabs.org].</span>)

This page is updated each week (usually on Monday morning) with notes from the Sugar Labs community. (The digest is also sent to the community-news at sugarlabs.org list and blogged at [http://walterbender.org/ walterbender.org].) If you would like to contribute, please send email to [[User:walter|walter]] at sugarlabs.org by the weekend. (Also visit <span class="plainlinks">[http://planet.sugarlabs.org planet.sugarlabs.org].</span>)

===Sugar Digest ===

<b>Sugar Digest </b>

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.  

1. I spent the weekend in Bergen, Norway at a Skolelinux sprint ("Software for educators with an open mind"). The meeting was organized by Knut Yrvin and Petter Reinholdtsen and held at the local university. It was a great opportunity for me to get more insight into both the goals of and processes employed by the SkoleLinux community. It was also a chance to meet in person some long-time collaborators and the next wave of contributors, many of whom were as new to Skolelinux as I was.

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

Like Sugar Labs, Skolelinux is committed to providing great learning tools to teachers and students. (I had not realised that my former student, Håkon Wurm Lie, was involved in the initial launching of SkoleLinux.) They primarily work with universities and secondary schools; they have focused on packaging "handpicked software" addressing daily needs in schools in such a way that it is easy to install and maintain. They are a Debian shop; they have a kickstart that supports a workflow within a school setting.

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.

In the very early days of OLPC (early in 2006) I had spoke with Knut; at the time it wasn't yet clear where we (OLPC) were heading regarding software and packaging. Today, it is clear that working with Skolelinux would be both an appropriate interface into the greater Debian community and a way for us to get more insight and help in regard to packaging Sugar in a way that makes it easier for teachers and schools to deploy.

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]].

2. In response to a question this weekend about running Sugar Activities outside of Sugar—I had more often thinking about the opposite problem: running GNU/Linux applications inside of Sugar—I spent time exploring the limitations of running Turtle Art from the shell. It was pretty trivial to launch Turtle Art, but I have yet to figure out a way to invoke a substitute to the Sugar toolbar, the datastore, or collaboration. Over time, it seems that all three of these modules could be dropped in or pulled out on the fly.

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

<b>In the community</b>

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.

3. La Facultad de Ingeniería organiza el "Scratch Day – ORT Uruguay University"  que tendrá lugar el 15 de mayo.

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.

<b>Sugar Labs </b>

# automatic display/keyboard language setting

Gary Martin has generated a SOM from the past week of discussion on the IAEP mailing list (Please see <a href="http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Image:2009-March-21-27-som.jpg">SOM</a>).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Gary Martin has generated a SOM from the past week of discussion on the IAEP mailing list (Please see [[:Image:2009-March-14-20-som.jpg|SOM]]).

=== Community News archive ===

=== Community News archive ===