Archive/Current Events/2009-06-01

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Sugar Digest

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. 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 planet and your videos to our Dailymotion channel.

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 Vijn has begun setting up some mirrors for Sugar Labs.

6. We are looking for help in the continued development of Sugarbot (See [1]). Contact Bernie Innocenti if you are interested in getting involved.

In the community

7. Inspired by the Paris Sugar Camp, Marten would like to make place for OLPC/Sugar at 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 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 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 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 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

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