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.) If you would like to contribute, please send email to walter at sugarlabs.org by the weekend. An archive of this digest is available [[Press/Archive|here]].

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.) If you would like to contribute, please send email to walter at sugarlabs.org by the weekend. An archive of this digest is available [[Press/Archive|here]].

=== Sugar Digest ===  

=== Sugar Digest ===

It has been a busy week for Sugar Labs.

1. Milan meeting: There will be a Sugar Labs meeting in Milan on Monday, 30 June. Please contact Walter Bender if you are interested in participating. (Walter also will be at the University of Tampere the weekend of the 28th—he is happy to meet with anyone interested in discussing Sugar before or after sauna.)

1. Sucrose: On behalf of the Release Team, Simon Schampijer announced Sucrose 0.81.2 (Development Release). Features of this new release include elimination of some platform dependencies, an improved activity-list view, a graphical user interface to the Sugar control panel (including settings for Frame activation delays), and expanded internationalization of Etoys. The next development release is scheduled in two weeks. Thanks to everyone who made this release possible! (Please refer to [[ReleaseTeam/Releases/Sucrose/0.81.2]] for detailed release notes.) XO users can test the release by updating to joyride-2024 (Please see [http://xs-dev.laptop.org/~cscott/olpc/streams/joyride/build2024/ build2024]).

=== Community jams and meetups ===

2. Governance: One of the challenges that free and open-source projects face is the impact of governance on their community members: while FOSS licenses assure access to source code, that doesn't guarantee a successful project. A governance model can help ensure that the project is run in a professional, disciplined, and equitable manner. Good governance lets the community engage in discourse and provides a transparent mechanism for arbitration in the hopefully rare circumstances in which it is necessary.

2. FOSSED: Kevin Cole is helping to promote the Free & Open Source Software in Education (FOSSED) conference to be held at the Governor's Academy in Byfield, Massachusetts, August 4th through 6th (For details, see http://fossed.blogspot.com/). The conference is (mainly) aimed at introducing teachers to FOSS.

A draft proposal for a governance model for Sugar Labs has been posted to the wiki (Please see [[SugarLabs:Governance]]). Community input and feedback is important: please help us get this done properly. Feel free to make corrections and comments in the wiki or on the IAEP list.

3. Home page: Tomeu Vizoso has been working on the layout for the Home page. This week, he:

* Made the layouts in the favorites view pluggable; and

* Implemented a random layout option.

3. It's an education project: This week has also seen a discussion of the educational mission of Sugar Labs in the main-stream media and blog-sphere—a refreshing change of pace from the focus on hardware. You can keep tabs on some of the threads by visiting the Press section of the wiki (Please see [[Press#Sugar in the news]]).

4. Browse: The Sugar team released a new version of the Browse activity this week ([http://dev.laptop.org/~erikos/bundles/Web-90.xo Web-90.xo]). It has many interesting features; please try it and give us feedback.

4. Help Wanted: Sugar Labs was created to provide a mechanism for supporting the Sugar community of volunteers. These volunteers are engaged in a variety of activities: some are writing software to improve Sugar; some are porting Sugar to new platforms; some are developing new activities that run in Sugar; some are helping to debug Sugar and help with quality assurance; some are writing documentation for Sugar developers and for those who use Sugar in the field; some are developing new scenarios for learning with Sugar; some are using Sugar and reporting upon their experiences to the community; and some are providing help and support.

5. activities.sugarlabs.org: David Farning is working on converting https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/ to work with Sugar and its ecosystem of activities.

Since we started Sugar Labs, we have been receiving a number of requests for help: porting Sugar to new distributions; tuning Sugar on a specific hardware platform; developing specific Sugar activity; helping with support in specific deployments, etc. In order to expedite these requests, a new section in the wiki ([[Sugar help]]).

6. Certificates: Marco Pesenti Gritti has made some progress on support for custom certificates in the Browse activity.

5. Wiki: David Farning continues to make great progress in organizing and fleshing out the Sugar Labs wiki. He has moved a great deal of the Sugar documentation over from wiki.laptop.org and is in the process of finishing up the translation menus and importing of some missing images. In support of the Developer Team, he is setting up an automated API documentation generator set up as well as jhbuild. He is seeking some help from the learning community to set up the Education Team pages (Please see the stub at [[EducationTeam]]).

7. Documentation: There are a number of complementary efforts for documenting the Sugar API and the process for creating sugar activities: (1) a high-level functional design of Sugar (See http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Human_interface_guidelines); (2) a set of "how to's"; (3) a set of APIs generated from the actual code (extracted through pydocs); and (4) some basic startup guides.  

=== Community jams and meetups ===

David Farning has spent the week cleaning up the Sugar application programming interface (API) reference documentation at api.sugarlabs.org. Code for the site is at [https://www.develer.com/gitweb/pub?p=users/dfarning/api.git;a=summary api.git] and a rough draft of an API tutorial can be found in the wiki ([[DevelopmentTeam/Tutorials/API_Documentation]]). David is soliciting modules from developers to add to the build_api.sh script, which he plans to run daily.

6. Developer meetings: Weekly sugar developers meetings were restarted this past week; meetings are Thursdays at 17:00 (UTC) on irc.freenode.net, on the #sugar-meeting channel (Please see [[DevelopmentTeam/Meetings]]). You are invited to join; please add topics that you'd like to discuss (Instructions are in the wiki at [[DevelopmentTeam/Meetings#How_to_add_topics]]).

Meanwhile, Walter Bender is pulling together a new Getting Started Guide based upon the one he wrote for OLPC, but that is reflective of a variety of platforms and considers some of the new features in the Joyride builds.

7. Review process: Simon Schampijer has written up notes about the code-review process (Please see[[DevelopmentTeam/CodeReview]]).

8. Read: James Simmons is working on text to speech with "Karaoke" highlighting be a built in part of the Sugar environment (Please see http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Read_Etexts and download it from [http://wiki.laptop.org/images/4/44/ReadEtexts-5.xo ReadEtexts-5.xo]).  

8. Auto-documentation: As mentioned above, David Faring has put together an alpha version of an automated API documentation system (Please see [http://www.sugarlabs.org/~dfarning/]). The APIs are generated using epydoc, which only documents Python files; any C code (or other languages) are not documented.

9. SocialCalc: Luke Closs is seeking feedback about the Socialcalc-xocom integration work he has done (Please see http://github.com/lukec/socialcalc-xocom/tree/master and download it from [http://github.com/lukec/socialcalc-xocom/tree/master%2FSocialCalcActivity-1.xo?raw=true SocialCalcActivity-1.xo]).

9. Activities: Simon reports that a new version of the log-activity has been released (You can download the source from [http://dev.laptop.org/pub/sugar/sources/log-activity/Log-9.tar.bz2 Log-9.tar.bz2] and the bundle from [http://dev.laptop.org/~erikos/bundles/other/Log-9.xo Log-9.xo]). The new log-activity enables users be able to read the Sugar logs on non-XO platforms.

10. Meta tools: David Van Assche and Martin Langhoff have been discussing various approaches to school administration tools on the Server Development list. Moodle, which will be bundled with the school server by default is compatible with a number of different tools, notably openadmin (http://richtech.ca/openadmin/). David recommends considering using ClaSS (http://www.laex.org/class) as it is "more targeted to just the administration of the school, attendance, grading, reporting and general student management." Please share your experiences with these tools.

Bert Freudenberg reports the release of a new version of Etoys (See [http://dev.laptop.org/pub/sugar/sources/etoys/etoys-3.0.2007.tar.gz etoys-3.0.2007.tar.gz] and [http://dev.laptop.org/pub/sugar/sources/etoys-activity/etoys-activity-82.tar.gz etoys-activity-82.tar.gz] or the ready-to-use bundles [http://etoys.laptop.org/rpms/etoys-3.0.2007-1.noarch.rpm etoys-3.0.2007-1.noarch.rpm] and [http://etoys.laptop.org/rpms/Etoys-82.xo Etoys-82.xo]). Look forward to more translatable phrases and a minor tile fixes.

11. Koji: Marco Pesenti Gritti, Dennis Gilmore, and Michael Stone have been discussing how to arrange our Koji tags for the 8.2.0 release. Assuming no serious objections, Michael will freeze the dist-olpc3 tag in the OLPC-3 CVS branch and create dist-olpc3-{devel,testing,updates} and dist-olpc4 tags. (OLPC-3 represents OLPC's third buildroot. Buildroots contain the compilers and basic system libraries necessary to build other packages. It may be helpful to create a dist-olpc3-devel-sugar to separate unrelated streams of development.)

Tomeu Vizoso has made great progress on the Browse activity (You can download the source from [http://dev.laptop.org/pub/sugar/sources/web-activity/Web-89.tar.bz2 Web-89.tar.bz2] and the bundle from [http://dev.laptop.org/~erikos/bundles/Web-89.xo Web-89.xo]). Improvements include making the object chooser transient on the activity window; an Edit toolbar; a Follow link item in the link palette; a palette for images; and a simple palette for links with an option to copy to the clipboard.

* dist-olpc3-devel - the site of ongoing development (by default, your packages will be built into this tag);

* dist-olpc3-testing - things that are ready for QA testing;

* dist-olpc3-updates - things that pass QA;

* dist-olpc4 - Fedora Rawhide tracker and buildroot experimentation (OLPC-specific changes needed to make Rawhide-based builds).

10. Feature freeze: The feature (and strings) freeze (20 June) is approaching very quickly (Please see [[ReleaseTeam/Roadmap#New_features]]).

12. Feature freeze: An update on the status of the ongoing features can be found in the wiki ([[ReleaseTeam/Roadmap#New_features]]).

11. Games: Robert Krahn reports that more games (now available as activities that can easily be installed from the Browse activity) are available at [http://www.swa.hpi.uni-potsdam.de/projects/olpc/ Student projects on the OLPC XO], thanks to the efforts of the HPI Software Architecture Group at the University of Potsdam.

13. Test plans: Michael Stone and the OLPC QA team are requesting that each release we get in the stable build is associated with a set of tests that they will perform to verify that things works as expected. It is proposed that it be mandatory to have a Trac item associated with each "news" in the git changelog and each Trac item would have a corresponding testcase.

12. LiveCD: Wolfgang Rohrmoser reports that a new release (080607) of the Livebackup XO-LiveCD is available (Please see [http://dev.laptop.org/pub/livebackupcd/build-708+joyride-2024 XO-LiveCD]). There is a mirror ([ftp://rohrmoser-engineering.de/pub/XO-LiveCD/ XO-LiveCD]) in Germany.

In parallel, we'd like to start more formal user-testing in the field of some of the proposed Sugar feature changes. Walter had been in discussion with the deployment teams in Uruguay, Paraguay, and Peru about designating test environments. We'll likely use the new Frame behavior as a test case for testing.

This Live-CD project targets the main goals:

14. Developers Meeting: Simon Schampijer reports that a summary of this week's developers meeting can be found here in the wiki ([[DevelopmentTeam/Meetings#Thursday_June_12_2008_-_17.00_.28UTC.29|12 June notes]]). Simon will be on a well-deserved holiday for the next two weeks; Tomeu will be hosting the weekly meeting on irc.

* Give children, students, teachers and parents the opportunity to participate and use the educational software on a generic PC;

* Demonstration of OLPC/Sugar software to non-developers; you can also start the sugar desktop on Windows, Linux or MacOS using a Virtual Machine; and

* For developers the CD provides an easy maintainable Live-System, which could be used to develop and test activities on the Sugar desktop.

=== Sugar Labs ===

* Dual boot option for update.1 and joyride builds; you can try out the new Sugar design by booting a recent (2024) OLPC joyride version;

Further information is available (Please see [ftp://rohrmoser-engineering.de/pub/XO-LiveCD/XO-LiveCD_080607.pdf XO-LiveCD_080607.pdf] and join the discussion at [http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/livebackup-xo-cd livebackup-xo-cd discussion]).

15. Wiki translations: Chris Leonard has added GoogleTrans templates to many of the pages in wiki.sugarlabs.org; while machine translation is not yet as good as human translation, it gives a reasonable facsimile, hence making the wiki more immediately accessible to a broader audience.

 

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-May-31-June-06-som.jpg]]). From looking over the map, the discussion seems to have been focused on Sugar development: what is used, needed, made and to be made.

16. 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-07-13-som.jpg]]). The discussion seems to have been focused on features ("needs") and documentation.

==Sugar in the news==

==Sugar in the news==