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, blogged at [http://walterbender.org/ walterbender.org], and [[Archive/Current Events|archived here]].) 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, blogged at [http://walterbender.org/ walterbender.org], and [[Archive/Current Events|archived here]].) 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 ==

== Sugar Digest ==

1. The OLPC XO 1.75 machines (beta units) are starting to be distributed to developers. This machine is ARM based, which means that it will have superior battery life once all of the fine-tuning is complete. It also means that it uses some different components, e.g., audio circuitry, so there is some driver work to be done. But so far, so good.

1. It seems that this is the season for Sugar Camps. The Paris Camp was by all reports quite success. Christoph Derndorfer reported on Days [http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/iaep/2011-September/014040.html 1] and [http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/iaep/2011-September/014053.html 2] of the camp, which focused mainly on deployments and emerging educational activities from OLPC France. Daniel Drake reported progress on the Sugar development front during the [http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/sugar-devel/2011-September/033343.html code sprint] track:

One of the nice things about the 1.75 is that the OLPC engineering team threw in a few additional sensors. Saadia Husain Baloch got the accelerometer working and I immediately wrote a Turtle Art plug-in (included with v114). Saadia wrote a fun 'etch-a-sketch' program in Turtle Art that works by shaking the machine.

:Raul and myself spent most of last weekend's Sugarcamp Paris working on removing hippocanvas from Sugar, with some help from Simon too. This was based on earlier work by Raul and Walter.

Not to be outdone, I added an enhancement to the Portfolio activity while I was on a short flight last week. If you hit the left side of the XO, it will advance to the next slide. If you hit the right side of the XO, it will return to the previous slide. The person sitting next to me on the plane told me, "That's the strangest thing I have ever seen anyone do with a computer."

:To just give a quick update, we made a lot of progress. Many things that had been hacked or disabled in the initial efforts were restored with clean code. We got down to just a handful of closing tasks.

The bottom line is the more sensors the better: we want to give young learners more opportunities to observe and interactive with the physical world.

Gustavo Ibarra announced a [http://ar.sugarlabs.org/go/SugarDay_Junin_Argentina_2011 Sugar Camp in Junin, Buenos Aires, Argentina] is next weekend: 25, 26 September. There will be Python programming workshop on the learning platform and Sugar Sugar Code Sprint.

2. At the Desktop Summit held in Berlin earlier this month, the Senate of Berlin and TSB Technology Foundation Berlin presented an award for promising project ideas based on open software to be realized in Berlin. The prize was given to Raffael Reichelt for his idea of opening real labs as a place for children to learn and work with Sugar.

Also in Paris next week, Sean Daly will represent Sugar Labs in presenting "OLPC/Sugar Deployment to Madagascar island of Nosy Komba" at the Open World Forum,

=== In the community ===

Mariana Ludmila Cortés, Pablo Flores, and I are giving a [http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Taller_Sugar_Ciudad_de_Mexico_Setiembre_2011 Sugar workshop] on the tail end of an OLE conference in Mexico City at the end of the month.

3. The September (10–11) [http://olpc-france.org/blog/sugar-camp-2011-in-paris/ Paris Sugar Camp] is building up momentum. Preliminary program:

There will be an OLPC San Francisco Community Summit 2011 on Friday, October 21 at 5:00pm at the SFSU Downtown Campus.

* Saturday afternoon:  Plenary session (OLPC France’s activities, OLPC deployment feedback, etc.);

* Sunday afternoon: CodeCamp (bug hunting, code reviews, learning Sugar, ideas, etc.)

4. At the end of October (28–30) there will be a [[Marketing_Team/Events/Gtk3_Hackfest_2011|GTK3 hackfest]] at the BRMLAB Hacker Space in Prague. The focus will be:

The Prague Sugar Camp at the end of October is coming into focus. Since Daniel and Raul have made so much progress on the no-hippo work, we'll be able to spend most of our time looking at Gnome 3.0 and introspection issues. One by-product of this push to future-proof the Sugar platform is the re-engagement of some of our key developers, such as Marco Presenti Gritti, whose code reviews have been most welcome.

* removing Hippo and other custom widgets;

* migration path to GTK3 (Do we ship two toolkits? Do we migrate the shell and the toolkit and activities at once?);

* porting Sugar's theme to GTK3;

For more background on the hackfest goals, which is a follow-up of the Desktop Summit gathering, see [http://www.itevenworks.net/2011/08/catching-up-with-sugar-running-gtk3-activities/] and [[Features/GTK3/DesktopSummitActivities]].

5. The Sugar localization/developer/design/activity/release/testing teams have been busy working on the 0.94 release. This release will [[0.94/Feature_List|feature]]:

2. In addition to the aforementioned work on indigionus languages in Peru, a the Mexican team of about a dozen has completed the [http://wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Huastec_language Huastec] (Téenek) language localization of Sugar (and most of eToys) in about one month See [http://translate.sugarlabs.org/hus/]. The same team is looking into working on Nahuatl work. In Paraguay, there is some work in Gurani. It is great that Sugar will be available in children's first language. Having a strong first language is critical to developing good language skills in general. Many thanks to Chris Leonard and the many local teams he is working with.

* the reenabling of a filter in Home View (important now that there are so many activities);

* the ability to duplicate (with the intention of modifying) activities from the View Source submenu

* $HOME/Documents added to the Journal Volumes toolbar to facilitate access to files created outside of Sugar;

* support for removing connections and “forgetting” network credentials;

* refactoring of pootle/git interface to bring the location efforts into sync

Many thanks to everyone who has been working so hard on this release.

3. The [http://www.fing.edu.uy/inco/proyectos/butia/ Butia Team] at la Facultad de Ingeniería de la Universidad de la República has some more Turtle Art plugins: one for Follow Me and one for Sumo robotics. See [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ECP_GoTUm00 Video 1] and [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r6BIcfnVuwU Video 2]. [www.fing.edu.uy/inco/proyectos/butia/files/followme_ta_plugin.zip Plugins] are available.

 

6. [[Community/Distributions/Mageia|Mageia]], a Mandriva-based distribution, now has Sugar support (See https://bugs.mageia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1969).

=== Sugar Labs ===

=== Sugar Labs ===

<gallery>

<gallery>

File:2011-Aug-6-12-som.jpg|2011 August 6th–12th (28 emails)

File:2011-Aug-27-Sept-2-som.jpg|2011 Aug 27th-Sept 2nd (40 emails)

File:2011-Aug-13-19-som.jpg|2011 Aug 13th-19th (21 emails)  

</gallery>

</gallery>

Visit our planet [http://planet.sugarlabs.org] for more updates about Sugar and Sugar deployments.

Visit our planet [http://planet.sugarlabs.org] for more updates about Sugar and Sugar deployments.