Archive/Current Events/2009-03-24

Sugar Digest

1. The Sucrose 0.84 release is now official! Simon Schampijer and Tomeu Vizoso have put together comprehensive release notes (See 0.84 Release Notes). The long list of new features is impressive. And Sean Daly is spreading the word, having launched a major media blitz, a first for Sugar Labs, that has already gotten Sugar 0.84 exposure on Market Watch, Reuters, and Forbes. More to come.

2. In preparation for the media campaign, there has been a lot of work done behind the scenes to make the wiki more easily searchable and navigable. Fred Grose has been the driving force behind a wiki reorganization, which includes a subpage menu for each of the major sections. Plus, we have made progress in eliminating much of the CamelCase in the wiki that was interfering with search.

3. Aleksey Lim is making sure that all of our efforts are being put to good use. His ost recent magic is a revamped Sugar for Caixa Mágica, the distribution used by Project Magellan (Magalhães) and numerous other projects. Meanwhile, Sasche Silbe is working on getting sugar-jhbuild to work on Ubuntu Jaunty and Debian Squeeze.

Community jams, meet-ups, and meetings

4. The OLPC Learning Club – DC is hosting a Family XO Mesh Meetup on Saturday, 21 March 2009.

Help Wanted / Help Received

5. Jameson Quinn and Mel Chua have submitted our Google Summer of Code (GSoC) application. We have 10 mentors and a growing list of project ideas. While the number of interns who will be formally participating in GSoC will be relatively small, the mentoring framework being put into place will have impact above and beyond that one program. For example, Jeff Elkner sent out an email asking for mentoring support for some student projects; he got an overwhelming response from the community. Mentoring is a key to our growth.

Tech Talk

6. Sebastian Dziallas has also been working some magic. He has created a snapshot of the Sugar-on-a-Stick image (SoaS-2) as a virtual machine. (Note that SoaS-2 is the Fedora 11 version of Sugar on a Stick.)

In this tar.gz archive you'll find a .vmdk and a .xml file. The .vmdk file is nothing more than the disk image for VMware. You should be able to import it easily, also in other applications supporting this file type, such as VirtualBox (in which I tested it).

Please be aware that this image is still pre-alpha! It has quite a few bugs and is certainly not as stable as the SoaS-2 .iso images.

Sebastian has created this image by hand, but will start building them at the same time as the .iso files.

Sugar Labs

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