Sugar Labs/Current Events

What's new

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 walterbender.org.) If you would like to contribute, please send email to walter at sugarlabs.org by the weekend. An archive of this digest is available here.

Sugar Digest

1. Award-winning: We can start referring to Sugar as "award-winning software." It earned a silver medal in the International Design Excellence Awards '08 and was undoubtedly one of the reasons the OLPC XO-1 laptop won the gold medal (Please see IDEA_Awards).

2. Outreach: Dave Farning has been developing a road map for outreach to various communities (apparently we already have the attention of the design community; maybe our next award will be from the education community). Specifically, he suggests that we:

• Engage the package maintainers for the various Linux distributions
  • Make sure they are aware of Sugar;
  • Help build a community within each distribution to packages Sugar and Sugar Activities;
  • Help expand the community to include testers, developers, and translators.

• Engage education-focused distributions
  • Make sure they are aware of Sugar;
  • Make sure they are aware of the Sugar packaging efforts (either .deb or .rpm);
  • Help expand the community to include testers, developers, and translators.

• Engage the education community
  • Make sure they are aware of Sugar;
  • Help expand the community to include testers, developers, and translators;
  • Help expand the community to include development of pedagogy; models of use; etc.

Dave reports our progress to date:

• We are working with Fedora, Debian, and Ubuntu and are working towards a basic set of stable packages for their distributions;
• We are in the initial stage of identifying and establishing contact with eduction distributions (Please help us);

* Outside of the OLPC deployments, we are still in the initial stage of identifying and establishing contact with education communities (Again, your help is needed here--we want to establish a "bottom-up" approach to compliment the OLPC top-down efforts).

3. "Congratulations! but Sugar sucks": As we near code freeze for Sucrose 8.2, Ben Schwartz has identified six areas in need of improvement. In a thread with a somewhat unfortunate subject field, these are discussed as candidate areas we should focus on for the next release (Please see http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/sugar/2008-July/007390.html). The discussion begs the question of how Sugar Labs can rise above day-to-day deployment headaches in order to ensure that there is a solid foundation being built. A model I have been advocating for Sugar Labs is as the place where the goals and architecture for Sugar are established. The community, of course, vets those goals, critiques the architecture, and provides the means of achieving those goals.

4. "Kid contributions": John Gilmore started a discussion bemoaning the fact that as far as we know, there have not yet been any patches to Sugar submitted by a child (Please see http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/sugar/2008-July/007349.html). My response to John was:

• we need better tools for software development on the XO (Jameson Chema Quinn has been making some progress on the Develop activity—see below);
• while the children have not yet been making modification to the Sugar codebase, there is evidence of a cultural shift in schools using Sugar that is synergistic with the ideals of appropriation of not just software, but of ideas. Not a bad start.

5. OEMs: Are we ready to start contacting OEMs? (There are a number of new products being announced in the low-cost laptop space. How do we ensure that Sugar is an option for these products?)

6. Physics: Edward Cherlin has proposed we "start a physics textbook project combining Measure, Etoys, SciPy, and all of the low-cost instruments we can come up with" (Please see http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/sugar/2008-July/007269.html).

Community jams and meetups

7. Physics game jam: Brian Jordangi is organizing a physics game-jam competition in Boston, MA the weekend of August 29.

8. FLOSS Manual sprint: Anne Gentile is organizing an OLPC/Sugar FLOSS Manuals book sprint in Austin, TX at the end of next month.

Tech Talk

9. Sugar-jhbuild: I finally managed to get my xsessions configured so that I could run both Sugar as installed by apt-get sugar and the latest jpyride version I built by hand using sugar-jhbuild (Please see xsession for the details).

10. Sugar appliance: Bryan Kearney has built a Sugar appliance based upon the Thincrust toolkit (Please see Thincrust where you'll learn that "an appliance is a pre-configured application and operating system bundle"). The directions for using the appliance are:

1. Download http://sugar.s3.amazonaws.com/sugarAppliance.tar.gz
2. Unzip and untar it
3. Run virt-image sugar.xml
4. At the login, select "Autologin"

11. Develop: Jameson Chema Quinn has made a new version of Develop (Please see Develop). Jameson recommends you use a recent Joyride (> 2170).

12. Road-map updates: Marco Pesenti Gritti announced that letting the code freeze for this release slip. "With the current speed of development of the OLPC release it would just be impractical." Marco has started a tentative 0.84 schedule (Please see ReleaseTeam/Roadmap/0.84).

Marco is finally back working full time on OLPC. He spent this week fixing blocker bugs for the next release, doing a lot of triage and several patch reviews. He implemented an improved logic handling new windows in the Browse activity, which, while not yet ideal, should allow all the web sites that Uruguay has had problems with to work correctly. Marco also tracked down and fixed an infinite loop in the shell. Finally, with Tomeu Vizoso, he solved a problem with the web widget size allocation, which is likely to have caused several problems.

13. Sucrose Release Candidate 1: The new Sucrose 0.81.5 Development Release is out. Thanks to all the contributors! Simon Schampijer reports that we now have one more release before code freeze (excluding more changes to the road map). Please test, give feedback, and file bugs (Please see Sucrose 81.5).

Simon has been implementing a mechanism for feedback from 'Register' process in the form of an alert that is displayed in the Home view.

14. Computer vision: Nirav Patel is soliciting feedback regarding what computer vision should it be in regard to "gaming, input, accessibility, education, or anything else" (Please see http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/games/2008-July/000664.html). He gives some examples at http://eclecti.cc/olpc.

15. Etoys: Takashi Yamamiya reports that there is new release of Etoys, which includes Tubes, a Pango speed-up, and a fix to the clipboard.

• etoys-3.0.2059.tar.gz
• etoys-activity-85.tar.gz
• squeak-vm-3.10-3olpc6.i386.rpm

Sugar Labs

16. Infrastructure: Bernie Innocenti reports that on Monday, the following services were moved to Solarsail:

• mailing lists
• wiki.sugarlabs.org
• email aliases forwarding

Additional services that we might want to migrate from dev.laptop.org include:

• git
• trac
• the sugar@ mailing list
• wiki pages related to Sugar
• pootle

We decided to wait moving these until we get the full backups running and the machine racked in its final home.

Services still hosted by develer.com include:

• api.sugarlabs.org
• courses.sugrlabs.org
• developer accounts
• nameservers
• user drop box for downloads.sugarlabs.org

The above services will go on our second machine as soon if we get it racked. Develer is glad to keep them as long as needed.

Thanks to Bernie and Ivan Krstić.

17. Self-organizing map (SOM): Gary Martin has generated another SOM from the past week of discussion on the IAEP mailing list (Please see Image:2008-July-19-25-som.jpg). The verbs are prominent: doing; programming; learning; and education; math; etc.

Sugar in the news

18 July 2008	Bill Kerr – evaluating Sugar in the developed world
28 June 2008	OLPC News – A Cutting Edge Sugar User Interface Demo
18 June 2008	PC World – OLPC Spin-off Developing UI for Intel's Classmate PC
17 June 2008	Datamation – If Business Succeeds with GNU/Linux, Why Not OLPC?
11 June 2008	LinuxInsider – The Sweetness of Collaborative Learning
06 June 2008	Bill Kerr – untangling Free, Sugar, and Constructionism
06 June 2008	Open Education – Walter Bender Discusses Sugar Labs Foundation
06 June 2008	BusinessWeek – OLPC: The Educational Philosophy Controversy
05 June 2008	Code Culture – The Distraction Machine
05 June 2008	BusinessWeek – OLPC: The Open-Source Controversy
27 May 2008	The New York Times – Why Walter Bender Left One Laptop Per Child
26 May 2008	Ars Technica – OLPC software maker splits from X0 hardware, goes solo
22 May 2008	BetaNews – Linux start-up Sugar Labs in informal talks with four laptop makers
16 May 2008	OSTATIC – OLPC's Open Source Sugar Platform Aims for New Hardware
16 May 2008	PCWorld – Bender Forms Group to Promote OLPC's Sugar UI
16 May 2008	MHT – Bender jumps from OLPC, founds Sugar Labs
16 May 2008	News.com – Sugar Labs will make OLPC interface available for Eee PC, others
16 May 2008	Feeding the Peguins – The future of Sugar
16 May 2008	Sugar list – A few thoughts on SugarLabs
16 May 2008	xconomy – Bender Creates Sugar Labs—New Foundation to Adapt OLPC’s Laptop Interface for Other Machines
16 May 2008	BBC – '$100 laptop' platform moves on
15 May 2008	OLPC wiki – Dual-boot XO Claim: OLPC will not work to port Sugar to Windows.
16 May 2008	Softpedia – Bender Launches Sugar Labs for Better Development of OLPC's Sugar UI

Press releases

15 May 2008

Sugar Labs/Announcing Sugar Labs