Sugar on a Stick/Pineapple

Sugar on a Stick - Pineapple

a Sugar environment you can carry in your pocket

Pineapple will be the 6th version of Sugar on a Stick release expected in November 2011.

News report 09 October 2011

Release announcement

What's new in Pineapple

Sugar version 0.94. The most recent release of the Sugar Learning Platform features more activities with new toolbars and duplication features. More information about the 0.94 release of Sugar is available at 0.94/Notes.

Customize your own remix of Sugar on a Stick. Coconut has a slightly larger Activity selection than its predecessor Mango Lassi and has continued the trend of providing a few, better-tested Activities. We've realized that we'll never be able to create an Activity selection suitable for all deployments—instead, we've chosen to include and support a core set of basic, teacher-tested Activities in the default image, and invite deployments to use this as a base on which to build a customized Activity selection for their classrooms. See: Build Your Own Remix with Fedora customization guide Sugar on a Stick/Sugar Clone A quick, but less pristine, method of build customization ASLO Activity Collection DVD full of ASLO xo activities to Drag Drop into Soas Journal from DVD for Individual customizations.

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Sugar on a Stick is a Fedora Spin. Since SoaS v3 Mirabelle, Sugar on a Stick has been recognized by the Fedora Project as an official Spin. This ties us more closely to Fedora's release cycle and gives us resources from their engineering and marketing teams, which extends the reach of Sugar on a Stick and makes the project itself more sustainable. In exchange, users of Fedora have access to an easily deployable implementation of the Sugar Platform; it's a great example of a mutually beneficial upstream–downstream relationship.

Contributing to Sugar on a Stick

With v6 of Sugar on a Stick, the team recognizes the need to continue to improve its release processes and engineering sustainability. New contributors are urged to get involved and help us move towards our long-term vision of bringing stability and deployability to Sugar's personalized learning environment.

If you'd like to contribute to the next version, due for release in November of 2011, join our mailing list and visit Sugar on a Stick. All types of contributions are welcome, from the technical to the pedagogical, and we're happy to teach what we know and learn what you have to share.

Thank you to all the people involved for their awesome work!

Release history

Introduction

This section is a recap of the events during the v5 Coconut release cycle of Sugar on a Stick.

• SoaS v5 is based on Fedora 15, and has been delayed. From the Fedora wiki,

  "The move to NetworkManager 0.9 came after the feature freeze, and the Sugar desktop wasn't accounted for in the scramble to get alternate desktop environments working with it." [1]

Beta Release

Download (Pineapple Beta)

Re-approved as a Fedora Spin

"[Spins are alternate versions of Fedora, tailored for various types of users via hand-picked application sets and other customizations." --from http://spins.fedoraproject.org/about

See the release notes for v3 and v4 for history on the transition to a Fedora Spin.

Feature process

• Features/Soas_V5/

QA

Much thanks to Peter Robinson who did a majority of the work to program, prepare and coordinate the work with many other sugar developers for this release.

Thomas Gilliard did field-testing (building real SoaS sticks from .iso files and testing on those) - it's the closest thing to systematic testing we've had yet, though we still have a ways to go.

Thank you also to James Cameron in Australia for his testing help!

Much help was also provided by the team at #fedora-qa; freenode IRC

Documentation

A new release of documentation should come out with each new release of SoaS (although resources have prevented this).

The Fedora-site documentation may not be an improvement over our Sugar Labs, ad hoc wiki documentation methods, as the tools needed to participate are more complicated, and the Spin page documentation is not open to editing. The Fedora Sugar on a Stick pages have not been edited since Mirabelle was released in May 2010. The attempt to better support a small number of known, working, "how to set up SoaS", instructions has not yet been fulfilled.

Major accomplishments this release cycle

• Expanded discussion with upstream Fedora especially Fedora QA team and the new AutoQA processes. Initial integration in the Fedora Desktop QA testing process with initial guidelines and test process created. This will be expanded in Fedora 15 for the SoaS v5 release.

Press coverage

Feel free to add links to press coverage you find about Coconut to this section.