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Line 7: − + − The OLPC France meeting, attended by about 50 people, gave us a chance to network with some old friends and colleagues and build some new connections that will further enhance the Sugar community. For example, Tomeu Vizoso, Bernie Innocenti, and I had a chance to spend time with Bruno Coudoin; we discussed various ways we can improve upon the GCompris integration into Sugar. It was also great to finally meet in person Sugar contributors such as Gary Martin, Sache Silbe, David Van Assche, and Marten Vijn. It was also great that Marco Presenti Gritti was able to attend. The day was broken up into a number of parallel workshops, with a overall focus on deployment needs. Many of us never left the coffee bar, where there was continuous conversation. Kudos to Bastien Guerry and Lionel Laske for organizing a great day at a great venue and bringing together such interesting people.+ − About one half of the Saturday attendees came to Sugar Camp on Sunday. Sean Daly organized the day; he provided his flat for an urban camping experience for the attendees and found a great venue overlooking the canal on Quai de Jemmapes. We didn't have preset agenda topics, rather we spend the first hour using SCAMPER to expand our thinking about potential discussion topics (See [[Sugar_Labs/Current_Events/Archive/2009-05-11]]). From the four topics I had listed as a seed to the discussion, we generated almost 50 ideas. We then used a variant of PPCo to define four topics for the day, which we labeled: Sugar Roadmap, Packaging Sugar, Marketing Roadmap, and the School Experience. Within each group, we iterated upon the process to generate working groups that would be tasked with coming up with tasks and deliverables. (I'll be posting the meeting notes as soon as the group secretaries send them my way.)+ − − There have been several postings regarding Sugar Camp from the perspectives of the various attendees, e.g., [http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/iaep/2009-May/005730.html David Farning's] and [http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/marketing/2009-May/001009.html Sean's] posts. There was very positive feedback regarding the creativity process—we stretched ourselves and enriched the discussion as a result. And of course, it was great to spend time together. The downside was that we were not at all successful in engaging the on-line community in the process—in part due to technical difficulties (a flaky network) and in part by not have a good sense of how to do it. This is something we should work on in advance of the next gathering, which will likely be at LinuxTag in Berlin. Another downside was that we really could have used another day or two to go into more depth on some topics, particularly technical themes. A codefest as a follow-up to the weekend would have been ideal. − − (There are photos from both days [http://www.flickr.com/search/?d=taken-20090515-&q=sugarcamp&m=text here] and [http://www.flickr.com/photos/50394334@N00/ here] and [http://www.codewiz.org/wiki/pictures/conf/Sugar_Camp_Paris_2009 here].) − − 2. Tomeu, Marco, Bastian, and I formed one of the afternoon working groups. Our goal was to come up with some concrete suggestions regarding telling the Sugar story. We decided to start off with something pretty basic: the generation of more screencasts of Sugar from a wide variety of viewpoints, e.g., developers, teachers, students, etc. Both Chris Ball and the MediaMods team had written [http://dev.laptop.org/~cjb/screencast/Screencast-1.xo screencast activities] that would merit some TLC. Meanwhile, Bastian helped me get xvidcap running on my machine (an HP laptop running Ubuntu Jaunty) so that I could make videos from sugar_jhbuild: − sudo apt-get install xvidcap+ − You can run xvidcap from within Sugar itself from the Terminal activity or, perhaps easier in the context of sugar_jhbuild, run it in parallel with Sugar.+ − I made [http://www.dailymotion.com/sugarlabs/video/15676869 a test video] of the xo-color activity and posted the results to dailymotion.com with tags such as "Sugar" and "activity". I plan on creating a wide range of videos, showing everything from running activities to installing them to debugging them. Let's try to flood Dailymotion with great Sugar stories. (BTW, Dailymotion will automatically convert videos to OGG so that they will run within Sugar without the need for proprietary codecs.) Sebastien Adgnot has already set up [http://olpc.dailymotion.com an OLPC channel] and will make a Sugar channel available as well.+ − ===Help Wanted===+ − 3. We need your Sugar stories.+ − 4. The next [http://ceibaljam.org Ceibal Jam] in Uruguay will be in two weeks (30 May and 6 June at the University of Montevideo). Programmers are invited, but also designers, educators, artists, and anyone who wants work in the design, content, programming and testing of new activities or the improvement of existing activities. Who is coming from Sugar Labs?+ + + − ===Tech Talk===+ − 5. Chris Ball announced on behalf of OLPC that they have decided to base the software release for the new XO-1.5 laptop on Fedora 11. They plan to use a full Fedora desktop build, booting into Sugar but giving users the option to switch into a standard GNOME install instead. (The new machines will have 1GB of RAM and 4GB of flash, so we have enough room for both environments at once.)+ − 6. Chris also announced that Build 8.2.1-802 will be the final 8.2.1 Release for the OLPC XO-1 hardware (See [http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Release_notes/8.2.1 Release notes] and [http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Release_notes/8.2.1#Upgrade_instructions Instructions for upgrading to the 8.2.1 Release]).+ − 7. James Simmons has offered some good advice regarding [http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/iaep/2009-May/005663.html "Creating Your First Sugar Activity."] + + + + − 8. Gary Martin has generated a SOM from the past week of discussion on the IAEP mailing list (Please see [[:Image:2009-May-som-9-15.jpg]]).+ +
→What's new
===Sugar Digest ===
===Sugar Digest ===
1. I'm back from an exhilarating weekend in Paris, where we celebrated the one-year anniversary of the founding of Sugar Labs: Saturday was the OLPC France meeting at La Cantine and Sunday was Sugar Camp at La Ruche—both venues a short walk from my cousin's flat near République.
1. Between yesterday's announcement of a major new deployment in Australia (Sugar running on the OLPC XO-1) to a flurry of smaller-scale, grassroots Sugar on a Stick deployments to the pick-up of Sugar by most of the upstream Linux distributions to the growing volume of discussion about pedagogy on the mailing lists and in the chat rooms, it is readily apparent that Sugar and the Sugar community are growing in both size and stability. Thank you.
2. [[Sugar_Labs/Current_Events/lang-es Hablamos español.]] The Sugar Digest is being translated into Spanish.
===Help Wanted===
3. But there is more to do. We especially need your Sugar stories to communicate both our successes and areas where we need to do better. Please add your blog to our [http://planet.sugarlabs.org/ planet] and your videos to our [http://www.dailymotion.com/sugarlabs Dailymotion channel].
[[Sugar_Labs/Getting_Involved|Other ways to get involved]] are described in the wiki.
4. David Van Assche suggested that "it would be nice if we had an activitiy matrix that showed the stages of projects." Gary Martin pointed out that the Activity Team has "been making contact with past authors, slowly, slowly we're moving along even if it means adopting extra activities ourselves." It would be great to accelerate this process as there is growing demand for Sugar activities. Please contact the Activity Team if you are interested in adopting an orphaned activity.
5. Marten Vihn has begun setting up some [[Mirrors|mirrors for Sugar Labs]].
6. We are looking for help in the continued development of Sugarbot (See [http://code.google.com/p/sugarbot/wiki/HowDoesSugarbotWork]). Contact Bernie Innocenti if you are interested in getting involved.
===In the community===
===In the community===
7. Inspired by the Paris Sugar Camp, Marten would like to make place for OLPC/Sugar at [http://opencommunitycamp.org OpenCommunityCamp]. The Camp will be held from 26 July through 2 August in the Netherlands (near Schiphol Airport, Amsterdam).
===Tech Talk===
8. Sebastian Dziallas has created a new [http://download.sugarlabs.org/soas/snapshots/2/Soas2-200905241902.iso Sugar-on-a-Stick snapshot] for you. It incorporates the latest packages from the upcoming F11 release as well as some additional activities.
9. Simon Schampijer is planning to iterate over the [[Development_Team/Release/Roadmap/0.86#Proposal_Goals|Sugar 0.86 Roadmap]] at this week's developers meeting (Thursday at 16:00 UTC).
10. Sayamindu Dasgupta has been "revisiting" the topic of replacing Matchbox with Metacity, a more standard window manager. He has created [http://people.sugarlabs.org/sayamindu/isos/Soas2-200905212052_sayamindu_metacity.iso an ISO image] in which Sugar uses an unmodified Metacity. The image also has the Gimp, xterm and gcalctool so that you can test how Metacity treats those applications normally, while Sugar activities still use the entire screen.
11. Michael Stone reports "a small victory": he worked out [[Development_Team/Chroot|instructions]] that enabled him to run the Ubuntu Jaunty Sugar packages in a debootstrap chroot on my home machine. Michael's recommendation for a weekend project for someone:
* make the instructions work on more platforms
* figure out how to cache the downloads, e.g. with approx
* bake his logic into a downloadable script or makefile
===Sugar Labs ===
===Sugar Labs ===
12. Gary Martin has generated a SOM from the past week of discussion on the IAEP mailing list (Please see [[Image:2009-May-16-22-som.jpg]]).
=== Community News archive ===
=== Community News archive ===