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===

===Sugar Digest ===

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.

1. We are getting very close: Caroline Meeks and I visited the computer lab at the Waltham Massachusetts YMCA to test the latest Sugar on a Stick images built by Sebastian Dziallas and the release team. The lab is a small room with 10 tower PCs of different models and manufaturers. We managed to get nine out of ten machines to boot. Three of the machines required a "helper CD", since they didn't have USB boot ability in the BIOS. The one machine that would boot Sugar on a Stick wouldn't even power on, so arguably we had a 100% success rate!!

Like Sugar Labs, Skolelinux is committed to providing great learning tools to teachers and students. (I had not realized 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 work flow within a school setting.

There are still a few issues to work out: the helper CD, which is based on Fedora 9, only seems to work for SoaS-1 (the Fedora-10-based images). Sebastian, Sascha Silbe, and Simon Schampijer are investigating (and issued a new helper CD will I was writing this). A seemingly more intractable issue is the network. The lab has a wired network with static IP addresses assigned to each machine. I was able to get the network working but the process is tedious—I don't think we can expect teachers and youn children to use ifconfig, route, etc. from the shell. I also had to boot each machine in Windows, get the IP address, netmask, gateway, and DNS, but this is something that needs only to be done once per machine. Configuring the network on Sugar on a Stick has to happen every time, presuming the children will be jumping from machine to machine. A control panel widget for setting up a static IP address is a first step, but I wonder if there is an easier way.

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.

Caroline and I will be back to the Y in a week (Healthy Kids Day) to test the set up with children and parents attending a day-long open house. This will be the first real test of Sugar on a Stick by children in a real-world setting.

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.

 

2. I am more than a little behind in my weekly Sugar update. Between planes, trains, and automobiles I have not had the time or ability to concentrate on writing.

 

After leaving the SkoleLinux meeting in Bergen, I went to Paris where I spent a couple of days meeting with Sean Daley, Patrick Sinz, and the crowd at Solutions Linux. Sean and I demoed Sugar on a Stick to a crowd gathering around the Open Office booth–Open Office has a team in France working on a version for children (and maybe for Sugar?). Other potential projects we discussed at Solutions Linux included extending the file sharing and privacy models within Sugar.

 

From Paris I went to Bolzano, where I spent two days with another Patrick—Ohnewein—and Bernie Innocenti at the TIS Innovation Park. We met with Prof. Alessandro Efrem Colombi and some of his colleagues and students from the Free University of Bozen - Bolzano faculty of education. We had an animated discussion about how to advance the engagement of teachers in constructionist thinking as facilitated by Sugar. He and his students seem ready to engage from both a pedagogical and technological perspective.

 

Back in Boston, I met with Seth Weinberger. His foundation, [http://www.innovationsforlearning.org Innovations for Learning], makes the TeacherMate, a small hand-held device with embedded Gnash applications running in it. He and his team have developed some nice reading and math activities that could be readily ported to Sugar in the form of Gnash deasktop activities, as per the [http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/sugar-devel/2009-April/013631.html discussion about bundles] being led by Wade Brainerd on the sugar-devel list.

===In the community===

===In the community===

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

3. Looks like Sugar Labs be joining OLPC France at a "Sugar Camp" in Paris on the weekend of 16 May. Details forthcoming.

 

The Engineering Faculty at ORT University in Uruguay is hosting "Scratch Day" on 15 May 2009.

4. Luke Macken has added support in the Fedora [https://fedorahosted.org/liveusb-creator/ liveusb-creator] for automatically downloading various Fedora releases, as well as Sugar on a Stick!

===Sugar Labs===

===Sugar Labs ===

Gary Martin has generated a SOM from the past week of discussion on the IAEP mailing list (Please see [[:Image:2009-March-21-27-som.jpg|SOM]]).

5. Gary Martin has generated a SOM from the past week of discussion on the IAEP mailing list (Please see [[:Image:2009-Mar-28-Apr-3-som.jpg|SOM]]).

=== Community News archive ===

=== Community News archive ===