Sugar Labs

Archive/Current Events/2008-06-09: Difference between revisions

New page: === Sugar Digest === It has been a busy week for Sugar Labs. 1. Sucrose: On behalf of the Release Team, Simon Schampijer announced Sucrose 0.81.2 (Development Release). Features of this ...
 
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=== Sugar Digest ===
=== Sugar Digest ===


It has been a busy week for Sugar Labs.
1. Software Freedom Conservancy: Sugar Labs is entering discussions
with the Software Freedom Conservancy (Please see
http://conservancy.softwarefreedom.org/overview/). If we are accepted
into the Conservancy, we'd join projects such as Inkscape, Samba, and
Wine. The Conservancy provides member projects with free financial and
administrative services, but does not involve itself with
technological and artistic decisions.
 
2. Governance: We will be gathering in Milan at the end of the month
of June to discuss, among other things, possible models of governance
for Sugar Labs. More details will follow soon.
 
3. Linux Foundation: Walter Bender and Jim Zemlin (Executive Director
of the Linux Foundation) met to discuss ways in which we could work
together. The Linux Foundation "hosts collaboration events among the
Linux technical community, application developers, industry, and end
users", manages a "Technical Fellowships Fund" to ensure key projects
get accomplished, and helps promote Linux regionally. Obviously lots
of synergy with the Sugar Labs mission!
 
4. UMPC abundance: The success of the OLPC XO and the ASUS Eee PC
seems to have attracted the attention of the industry: it has been a
busy week in the world of ultra-mobile PCs. Dell (See
http://www.engadget.com/2008/05/29/dells-mini-inspiron-eee-pc-killer-revealed/),
Acer (See http://www.engadget.com/2008/05/29/first-pics-of-acers-aspire-one-eee-pc-twin/),
Wizbook (http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquirer/news/2008/05/28/noon-eee-pc-wizbook-hits),
Elonix (See http://www.desktoplinux.com/news/NS8294433279.html), and
Kanguru (See http://pc.kanguru.pt/Home/) were all making headlines.
Each of these machines represents yet another potential platform for
running Sugar.
 
 
=== Community jams and meetups ===


1. Sucrose: On behalf of the Release Team, Simon Schampijer announced Sucrose 0.81.2 (Development Release). Features of this new release include elimination of some platform dependencies, an improved activity-list view, a graphical user interface to the Sugar control panel (including settings for Frame activation delays), and expanded internationalization of Etoys. The next development release is scheduled in two weeks. Thanks to everyone who made this release possible! (Please refer to http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/ReleaseTeam/Releases/Sucrose/0.81.2 for detailed release notes.) XO users can test the release by updating to joyride-2024 (Please see http://xs-dev.laptop.org/~cscott/olpc/streams/joyride/build2024/).
5. PyOhio: Catherine Devlin is helping to organize a regional
miniconference on Python programming Saturday, July 26, in Columbus,
Ohio (Please see http://pyohio.org). Ralph Hyre, a Sugar community
organizer in Cincinnati, suggested that someone might be willing to
present on Sugar (and OLPC project). It is just past the date for
their "call for proposals", but they may be willing to accept a late
submission. (Please email Mat Kovach <matkovach@gmail.com> or call at
216-798-3397.)


2. Governance: One of the challenges that free and open-source projects face is the impact of governance on their community members: while FOSS licenses assure access to source code, that doesn't guarantee a successful project. A governance model can help ensure that the project is run in a professional, disciplined, and equitable manner. Good governance lets the community engage in discourse and provides a transparent mechanism for arbitration in the hopefully rare circumstances in which it is necessary.


Some attributes that are necessary for good governance include: meritocracy, transparency of process, open access to anyone who has demonstrated the skills to contribute, and a means to ensure a balance of control so that no one special interest wrests control of either the discourse or the decision-making.
===Tech Talk===


A draft proposal for a governance model for Sugar Labs has been posted to the wiki (Please see http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/SugarLabs:Governance). Community input and feedback is important: please help us get this done properly. Feel free to make corrections and comments in the wiki or on the IAEP list.
6. Sugar tip of the week: How to install activities. There a several
ways to manually install new activities in Sugar:
(A) You can use xo-get from the Terminal activity (See
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Xo-get for the details). Find activities by
typing:


3. It's an education project: This week has also seen a discussion of the educational mission of Sugar Labs in the main-stream media and blog-sphere—a refreshing change of pace from the focus on hardware. You can keep tabs on some of the threads by visiting the Press section of the wiki (Please see http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Press#Sugar_in_the_news).
./xo-get.py list


4. Help Wanted: Sugar Labs was created to provide a mechanism for supporting the Sugar community of volunteers. These volunteers are engaged in a variety of activities: some are writing software to improve Sugar; some are porting Sugar to new platforms; some are developing new activities that run in Sugar; some are helping to debug Sugar and help with quality assurance; some are writing documentation for Sugar developers and for those who use Sugar in the field; some are developing new scenarios for learning with Sugar; some are using Sugar and reporting upon their experiences to the community; and some are providing help and support.
Install activities by typing:


Since we started Sugar Labs, we have been receiving a number of requests for help: porting Sugar to new distributions; tuning Sugar on a specific hardware platform; developing specific Sugar activity; helping with support in specific deployments, etc. In order to expedite these requests, a new section in the wiki (http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_help).
./xo-get.py install <activity-name>


5. Wiki: David Farning continues to make great progress in organizing and fleshing out the Sugar Labs wiki. He has moved a great deal of the Sugar documentation over from wiki.laptop.org and is in the process of finishing up the translation menus and importing of some missing images. In support of the Developer Team, he is setting up an automated API documentation generator set up as well as jhbuild. He is seeking some help from the learning community to set up the Education Team pages (Please see the stub at http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/EducationTeam).
e.g.,


./xo-get.py install simcity


=== Community jams and meetups ===
or


./xo-get.py install /media/<USB stick name>/simcity.xo


===Tech Talk===
(B) You can also install pre-bundled activities from the Terminal
activity or, if you have an XO laptop, from a customization key (See
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Customization_key):


6. Developer meetings: Weekly sugar developers meetings were restarted this past week; meetings are Thursdays at 17:00 (UTC) on irc.freenode.net, on the #sugar-meeting channel (Please see http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/DevelopmentTeam/Meetings). You are invited to join; please add topics that you'd like to discuss (Instructions are in the wiki at http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/DevelopmentTeam/Meetings#How_to_add_topics).
./sugar-install-bundle /media/<USB stick name>/<Activity name.xo>


7. Review process: Simon Schampijer has written up notes about the code-review process (Please see http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/DevelopmentTeam/CodeReview).
(C) You can install activities from the browser, either over the
internet or from USB (See
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Browse#Install_an_activity for details):


8. Autodocumentation: As mentioned above, David Faring has put together an alpha version of an automated API documentation system (Please see http://www.sugarlabs.org/~dfarning/). The APIs are generated using epydoc, which only documents Python files; any C code (or other languages) are not documented.
:a. open the Browse Activity
:b. point it to an activity bundle, e.g., http://web.media.mit.edu/~jmaloney/scratch-xo/Scratch-5.xo or file:///media/<USB stick name>/Scratch-5.xo
:c. When the download is complete, a journal entry will have been created. "Resume" the activity from the journal. Hence forth, it will appear in the list of installed activities.


9. Activities: Simon reports that a new version of the log-activity has been released (You can download the source from http://dev.laptop.org/pub/sugar/sources/log-activity/Log-9.tar.bz2 and the bundle from http://dev.laptop.org/~erikos/bundles/other/Log-9.xo). The new log-activity enables users be able to read the Sugar logs on non-XO platforms.
7. SocialCalc: Dan Bricklin has been hard at work on the base
SocialCalc code. In the next few weeks he hopes to have a new build
for availale. It will include a new tab with "Settings" that shows all
of the attributes of the current cell and sheet; it provides access to
all of the formatting options, including custom formats and colors,
padding, fonts, etc. Also, it should be better suited for localization
in that it will have a single Constants file with pretty much all of
the customizable values for the spreadsheet engine (but not the UI
above the sheet yet). At the point of this new release, Dan thinks we
should have something very useful for people to try.


Bert Freudenberg reports the release of a new version of Etoys (See http://dev.laptop.org/pub/sugar/sources/etoys/etoys-3.0.2007.tar.gz and http://dev.laptop.org/pub/sugar/sources/etoys-activity/etoys-activity-82.tar.gz or the ready-to-use bundles http://etoys.laptop.org/rpms/etoys-3.0.2007-1.noarch.rpm and http://etoys.laptop.org/rpms/Etoys-82.xo). Look forward to more translatable phrases and a minor tile fixes.
8. Metacity: Sayamindu Dasgupta has been experimenting with replacing
Matchbox with a Metacity as the window manager that runs behind Sugar.
Despite the fact that the Sugar UI is different from a standard
desktop, it is almost completely implemented using standard window
manager hints and properties, thus a move to a more compliant window
manager will make it possible to run standard desktop applications
directly within Sugar (Please follow the discussion at
http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/WindowManagement).


Tomeu Vizoso has made great progress on the Browse activity (You can download the source from http://dev.laptop.org/pub/sugar/sources/web-activity/Web-89.tar.bz2 and the bundle from http://dev.laptop.org/~erikos/bundles/Web-89.xo). Improvements include making the object chooser transient on the activity window; an Edit toolbar; a Follow link item in the link palette; a palette for images; and a simple palette for links with an option to copy to the clipboard.
A RPM of Sayamindu's patch is available for download
(http://dev.laptop.org/~sayamindu/sugar_metacity/metacity-2.23.21-2.olpc2.i386.rpm),
however, he warns that you should *not* install this patch on your
standard desktop machine yet. Things which have not been resolved yet
include: (1) Some activities tend to go into full screen mode
automatically; (2) Activity switching does not work yet; (3) Some
palettes and windows are placed incorrectly; (4) The mouse cursor
theme switches back to the normal (default??) one; and (5) Memory
usage with compositing enabled is high.


10. Feature freeze: The feature (and strings) freeze (20 June) is approaching very quickly (Please see  http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/ReleaseTeam/Roadmap#New_features).
9. Rainbow: Michael Stone released rainbow-0.7.13 with a fix for
#6989, a problem that was interfering with the launching of the Browse
activity.


11. Games: Robert Krahn reports that more games (now available as activities that can easily be installed from the Browse activity) are available at http://www.swa.hpi.uni-potsdam.de/projects/olpc/ thanks to the efforts of the HPI Software Architecture Group at the University of Potsdam.
10. Automated testing: Michael has offered Xen hosting for Sugar Labs'
automated testing efforts. (Xen is a FOSS standard for
virtualization—please see http://xen.org for details.)


12. LiveCD: Wolfgang Rohrmoser reports that a new release (080607) of the Livebackup XO-LiveCD is available (Please see http://dev.laptop.org/pub/livebackupcd/build-708+joyride-2024). There is a mirror (ftp://rohrmoser-engineering.de/pub/XO-LiveCD/) in Germany.
11. Wikipedia activity: Chris Ball has made the first release of the
Wikipedia activity, which contains a
30,000 article offline snapshot of the Spanish Wikipedia with 3,000
images. The activity is based on code from Patrick Collison's
"wikipedia-iphone" project; this version was mostly developed by
community volunteers: thanks to Wade Brainerd (porting from the
wikipedia-iphone code to a Python activity, fixing parser bugs), Ben
Schwartz (image download and scaling, bug-fixing) and Madeleine Ball
(algorithms for article and image selection). Please see
http://dev.laptop.org/~cjb/eswiki/ and
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/WikiBrowse for the download and more
details.


This Live-CD project targets the main goals:
12. Chat: Morgan Collett worked on private invites for Chat, although
* Give children, students, teachers and parents the opportunity to participate and use the educational software on a generic PC;
his final testing was blocked by a palette problem in Sugar. Morgan
* Demonstration of OLPC/Sugar software to non-developers; you can also start the sugar desktop on Windows, Linux or MacOS using a Virtual Machine; and
has also filed a patch for Ticket #5767 that uses black text on light
* For developers the CD provides an easy maintainable Live-System, which could be used to develop and test activities on the Sugar desktop.
fill colors to improve legibility.


The main features and changes since version 080321 include:
13. Browse: Tomeu Visozo has added some more palette options to
* Dual boot option for update.1 and joyride builds; you can try out the new Sugar design by booting a recent (2024) OLPC joyride version;
content in Browse, including copy, paste, undo, redo commands to the
* Improved CD customization; additional activities and RPM packages can be installed by putting them into CD top-level directories;
Browse toolbar. (Tomeu also fixed a problem with activity order in the
* A new script to prepare USB boot devices out of the Live-ISO image;
activity list and shell.)
* Tested on a wide range of PC and laptop hardware and proved to work with all common virtual machines on Windows, MacOS and Linux;
* Additional Xorg graphic drivers and improved X11 auto-configuration tools;
* Bug fixes, updates and new activities; and
* Linux kernel 2.6.24.7, using the aufs-filesystem.


Further information is available (Please see ftp://rohrmoser-engineering.de/pub/XO-LiveCD/XO-LiveCD_080607.pdf and join the discussion at http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/livebackup-xo-cd).
14. Icons: Scott Ananian has added a bit of functionality to his
(still incomplete) icon-draw-activity; it is on the path to becoming a
complete "convert SVGs into proper Sugar icons" tool. (Please see
http://dev.laptop.org/git?p=users/cscott/icon-draw-activity for
details.) Scott also filed bugs with improved icons for scratch
(#7140), gcompris (#7138), paint (#7139), turtle art (#6836), and
wikibrowse.


=== Sugar Labs ===
=== Sugar Labs ===


13. SOM: Gary Martin has generated another SOM from the past week of discussion on the IAEP mailing list (Please see       http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Image:2008-May-31-June-06-som.jpg). From looking over the map, the discussion seems to have been focused on Sugar development: what is used, needed, made and to be made.
15. LinuxTag: Simon reports that Members of the Sugar community
(Please see http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Image:LinuxTag-2008-Bernie-Reinier-Marco-Simon-Bert-Tomeu.jpg)
met this weekend at the Linuxtag 2008 (http://www.linuxtag.org/2008/)
in Berlin. Besides meeting people in person and the usual putting
faces to names, they discussed the current situation of Sugar: hot
topics Sugar on multiple platforms and the structure Sugar Labs.
 
Thanks to OLPC Germany and especially to Holger Levsen, there was also
an opportunity to give an introduction  to Sugar to the winners of an
Idea Contest (http://wiki.olpc-deutschland.de/Start?action=AttachFile&do=view&target=LinuxTag-2008-OLPC-Deutschland-Developers.jpg).
Robert Krahn gave a tutorial about using Squeak on the XO and Wolfgang
Rohrmoser handed out a
XO-Live CD (ftp://rohrmoser-engineering.de/pub/XO-LiveCD/) to people
who were interested in trying out Sugar on their machines.
 
16. SOM: Gary Martin has prepared this weeks SOM of the
its.an.education.project list (Please see
http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Image:2008-May-24-30-som.jpg).
Organization and governance seem to be hot topics (The list archive
can be found at
http://lists.lo-res.org/pipermail/its.an.education.project/).
 
17. Wiki: David Farning has been very busy organizing the Sugar Labs
wiki. His focus has been on building a framework to support teams
within the community:
* Accessibilty Team - Responsible for accessibility issues within Sugar.
* BugSquad - Responsible for locating and fixing bugs.
* Build Team - Responsible for creating daily and release builds.
* Development Team - Responsible for Developing the software modules
within Sugar.
* Documentation Team - Responsible for writing both user and technical
documentation.
* Education Team - Responsible for setting the Educational goals for
the sugar Community.
* Marketing Team - Responsible for marketing the Sugar brand and product.
* Development Team/Release - Responsible for shipping the current release and
planning for up coming releases.
* Sugar Labs - Responsible for governance and fund raising.
* Wiki Team/Translation - Responsible for the translation needs of the community.
* Design Team - Responsible for the User interface.
* Wiki Team - Responsible for the Sugar Labs wiki.
 
The community portal (http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Community) has a
link to each teams' section within the wiki.
 
[[Category:Sugar Digest]]
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