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| == Sugar Digest == | | == Sugar Digest == |
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| 1. Just back from two exhilarating weeks in India. Along with Harriet | | 1. Bradley and Tony have ask us for a summary of Sugar Labs activity for the Software Freedom Conservancy annual report. It has been a busy year, with tremendous progress on the technical front, but also real in roads into better understanding how to deploy Sugar in a wide variety of contexts. |
| Vidyasagar, I visited with Sugar and OLPC aficionados in Delhi, Goa,
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| Mumbai, and Guwahati. It was quite eye-opening. (Salil Konkar documented the
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| trip in a [http://monsoongrey.wordpress.com/2012/09/12/walter-benders-india-visit/ slideshow]
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| on his blog.)
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| The first stop was Delhi. Harriet had arranged meetings with Sesame | | ;GTK-3: The major technical effort over the past twelve months has been the transition to GNOME Toolkit 3. The developer team, lead by Simon Schampijer, has migrated Sugar to GTK-3 and in the process both made Sugar easier to maintain and also easier to support on devices such as the OLPC XO 4.0 Touch. This has been a community effort with contributions coming from engineers at OLPC, Activity Central, and the Sugar community at large. |
| Street India, which is using Sugar in an after-school program. They
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| were blown away when I told them the history of the Simple Graph
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| program, one of their favorites. Then we went to JNU where I met with
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| Dr. Ajith Kumar. Kumar works at the inter-university particle
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| accelerator center, but is also the inventor of [http://expeyes.in ExpEyes], a
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| peripheral device similar to Arduino (or Lego WeDo) but for more
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| serious EE work (it has a signal generator and a buffer for doing
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| precise sampling of signals). Of course, I could not resist writing a
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| [[Activities/Turtle_Art/Plugins#Expeyes|Turtle Art plugin for his device]].
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| I also attended a seminar on Digital Literacy sponsored by the
| | ;Sugar Activities: Our "app store" continues to grow, thanks in large part to contributions from Sugar users who have made the transition to Sugar developers. More than 10% of our apps were written by children who grew up with Sugar. Meanwhile, we are approaching eight-million downloads. |
| Hindustan Times, Intel, and Microsoft. The seminar itself was pretty
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| depressing: a very paternalistic approach to providing government
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| services to the masses. But I met a number of good people there whom I
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| will be following up with.
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| Also in Delhi, I got a chance to see Manusheel Gupta, who had interned
| | ;The next generation of hackers: Not only are Sugar users becoming Sugar activity developers, they are also beginning to work on Sugar itself. A large part of the effort to migrate Sugar activities to GTK-3 has been accomplished by youths; and these same young hackers are submitting patches to the Sugar toolkit as well. They are full-fledge members of our community. |
| for me in the very early days of OLPC. It was very nice to catch up.
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| The next stop was Goa, where there is a small OLPC deployment. One of
| | ;Internationalization push: Internationalization push: Chris Leonard has led an effort to recruit and assist translation teams so that Sugar has better coverage in the mother tongues and indigenous languages of our users. Over the past twelve months, we have seen substantive progress in the languages of: |
| the highlights of the trip was finally meeting Salil Konkar, who has | | * Oceania: Māori, Samoan (Gagana Sāmoa), Niuean (Vagahau Niue) |
| been maintaining the deployment on a volunteer basis. There are not
| | * Central and South America: Huastec (Tének), Xi'úi (Central Pame), Aymara (Aru), Quechua (Cusco-Collao) |
| enough laptops for each child to get their own, so before each class,
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| a selected group of students retrieve then (XO 1.0s) from a charging
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| station (designed at the Homi Bhabha Centre) for use in the class. The
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| students, perhaps seven to eight years old, were using the Numbers
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| activity that day, and although it was somewhat of a traditional class
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| in format--desks in rows facing forward--they were actively engaged
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| and helping each other. I had a prototype of XO Touch with me, so I
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| did a small study with some of the kids to see how they took to it.
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| (Although it is unfair to compare with the erratic touchpad of the | |
| first-generation XO 1.0s, it was nonetheless obvious that touch will
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| make a big difference: the interface, which had been getting in the
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| way was suddenly in background; all focus was on the math.)
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| Another highlight in Goa was the opportunity to meet Rita Paes, who
| | These efforts have often included working with the local experts to establish glibc locales for their languages, which will facilitate further localization work on any Linux-based system. |
| directs the [http://www.nirmala-institute.com/ Nirmala Institute], a teacher-training college. I got a
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| chance to talk to the students about Sugar (who welcomed me with a
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| lovely ceremony) and with Rita about the potential for establishing a
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| center of excellence for teacher training to support our efforts in
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| India. I saw great potential. Rita also introduced Harriet and me to
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| some locals who have interest in helping with the localization of
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| Sugar into Konkani. It was interesting to me that some people write
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| Konkani using [http://translate.sugarlabs.org/gom@latin/ Latin script], while others use [http://translate.sugarlabs.org/gom/ Devanagari script]. It is
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| somewhat of a political issue, so Chris Leonard has enabled both
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| communities to work in pootle.
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| From there, I went to the [http://www.unigoa.ac.in/department.php?adepid=10&mdepid=3 University of Goa], where I gave a
| | ;Sugar in the USA: While the majority of Sugar users are in Latin America and Africa, we are starting to make in roads into the United States. Programs like the ones led by Gerald Ardito have demonstrated the efficacy of Sugar within the US educational market. Larger-scale efforts by OLPC in Miami and Charlotte a driving growth. |
| lecture to the engineering students. The next evening, I gave a
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| seminar on how to write a Sugar activity to about seventy students.
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| Clearly there is some latent interest in the project. I also have a
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| lecture at the local meeting of the ACM, which happened to coincide
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| with my visit. Finally, I travelled an hour out of town to the
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| [http://www.gim.ac.in Goa Institute of Management], a beautiful campus on a hill top, to talk
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| to the students on the theme of "learning to change the world." We
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| discussed strategies for making Sugar (and OLPC) take hold on the
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| Peninsula. (See [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jj6awWWLoN0 Part 1],
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| [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=juaN4El1mC8 Part 2], and
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| [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjcDTuqeBvk Part 3].)
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| From Goa I travelled to Mumbai, where I was hosted by the Homi Bhabha
| | ;Teacher communities: Teachers are forming communities around Sugar to provide mutual support and to drive further pedagogical developments. They are using social media tools to form communities in which teachers and developers discuss problems and opportunities. Amazonas, Australia, et al. are leading the way. |
| Centre for Science Education Tata Institute of Fundamental Research,
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| specifically G Nagarjuna and his students at the [http://lab.gnowledge.org/ Gnowledge Lab].
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| G's students are well versed in Sugar, having been active in
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| supporting the OLPC deployment in [http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OLPC_India/DBF/Khairat_Chronicle Khairat]. Their principal project
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| is [http://metastudio.org metastudio.org], a peer-to-peer collaborative workspace that
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| utilizes many semantic features. We discussed the possibility of
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| folding some of their work into future School Server designs.
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| Hopefully they will be able to participate (mostly likely on line) in
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| the discussions at the [http://olpcsf.org/ SF summit].
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| From Mumbai, I visited two schools: a school for children with
| | ;Local initiatives: We have back down from our formal "local labs" initiative, but not from working locally. There are strong local support teams in Uruguay, Argentina, Peru, etc., working on extending Sugar to support local needs. |
| disabilities and the village school in Khairat. At the former, I
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| discussed with the computer teacher the possibility of using Sugar
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| instead of Microsoft Windows XP as a way to engage the children more
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| directly. While Sugar is attractive from the learning perspective, one
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| concern is that a good deal of the computer training is geared towards
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| an exam that is based on mastery of Microsoft products, which is a hurdle
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| the children must jump over in order to enter the job market. Of
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| course, for most populations of learners, master one word processor
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| means that one can quickly master any other, but it is still to be
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| demonstrated that such a transfer would occur with this population.
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| At the school in Khairat, I got a chance to see what has sprouted from
| | ;Sugar on a Stick: There have been more than 500,000 visits to the Sugar on a Stick page (a version of Sugar that will run on any x86-based computer that can boot from a USB stick). |
| the seed that Carla Gomez Monroy planted four years ago. Khairat was
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| one of the early OLPC deployments and, although the program has as yet
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| to take off in India as a whole, this program is still going strong.
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| Harriet and I were welcomed to the village with a traditional ceremony
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| that included beautiful garlands of flowers. We sat with some of the
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| mothers and preschool children, whom I immediately presented the XO
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| Touch. The children took to it immediately. One child, using paint,
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| [http://beta.metastudio.org/gstudio/resources/images/show/859/ kept looking at his finger for the ink]. But the real fun was visiting
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| the classroom. The children took turns standing in front of the class
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| to talk about their work: often drawing, custom-made memory games,
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| writing (in both English and Marathi--they are completely fluid in
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| switching between scripts on the XO keyboard), and Turtle Art. I got
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| to watch as a child figured out how to scale his drawings in Turtle
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| Art. I got a chance to present to the class, so I thought I would
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| engage them in something a bit different. Daniel Drake has written a
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| yet-to-be-released activity that features some animated dance and
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| exercise moves. I showed them some dances and they did not need
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| prompting to follow along. But then I asked them to show me some of
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| the local dance steps. I challenged them to make their own dance
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| videos and coached them through the process using Turtle Art. They quickly grasped the concept behind the various media
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| blocks (they had previously been using an old version of Turtle Art
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| that did not yet have these features). Together we engaged in some | |
| "hard fun."
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| [[File:Dancedance.png|300px]] | | ;GNU/Linux distributions: Thomas Gilliard compiled a list of distributions that have seen significant advances in the past year. |
| | * [http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_Network Sugar Network] (Aleksey Lim et al.) |
| | :: Fedora-14 based OLPC OS for XO laptops (i586) |
| | :: Ubuntu-10.04 and derivatives (i586, x86_64) |
| | :: Ubuntu-11.10 and derivatives (i586, x86_64) |
| | :: Ubuntu-11.04 and derivatives (i586, x86_64) |
| | :: Ubuntu-10.10 and derivatives (i586, x86_64) |
| | * [Trisquel http://devel.trisquel.info/dagda/iso/] 5.0 and 5.5 (Ruben Rodríguez) |
| | * [http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/OpenSUSE#openSUSE_12.2-sugar_0.96.2 openSUSE-EDU] (Jigish Gohil and Dram Wang) |
| | * [http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_Creation_Kit/sck/Advanced_Topics#ARM ARM] (Peter Robinson) |
| | * [http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/alt/stage/18-Alpha-RC3/ Fedora 18] |
| | * [http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Mageia Mageia] |
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| My next stop was IIT Guwahati. I gave the keynote at [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Techniche Techniche],
| | ;Community outreach: Sugar Labs provided support for several developer gatherings, including Sugar Camps in Lima Peru, Cambridge Mass, San Francisco CA, Prague Czech Republic, and GUADEC. |
| the annual techno-management festival. Interestingly, as I was staying
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| at the university guest house, I had a chance to interact with much of
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| the staff, particularly in the kitchen (did I mention I love Indian
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| food?). They were really taken with the XO and we discussed how we
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| might get some for their children. As it turns out, the students at
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| the IIT run a school for the children of the workers, so perhaps it is
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| not out of the question.
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| I spent another 24 hours in Delhi. Harriet and I spent much of the day
| | 2. Isabelle Duston has created a database of images (http://www.art4apps.org/) that is intended to reduce the cost of creating educational apps in particular for literacy. Feel free to use these images in your Sugar activities and to contribute to the database. She is also launching an App Challenge (See www.educationappsforall.org); Sugar activities qualify. |
| with Satyaakam Goswami and his students at JNU and members of the local FOSS community.
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| In addition to being
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| very active in helping to translate Sugar into Hindi, Satyaakam has
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| been working in an urban school in [http://vinaychaddha.blogspot.in/2012/08/presentation-at-electronics-rocks-2012.html Nithari], using Raspberry PI. I
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| visited the school and only have admiration for the teachers and
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| students who seem to be thriving despite very difficult circumstances.
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| As with the school for the disabled, much of the emphasis in the
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| school is for the children to pass their exams, so in discussion with
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| the teachers, we talked about trying to establish some
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| extra-curricular activities for the children using Sugar.
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| India opened my eyes both to the possibilities and the challenges of
| | 3. Edgar Quispe has finished 100% of Aymara for Fructose, a major step in supporting local languages in Peru. Quechua is also making rapid progress. |
| Sugar and OLPC. Many thanks to Harriet for her support. And to the
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| numerous volunteers I met who are trying to give the opportunity of
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| learning to so many children.
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| 2. In response to feedback from [http://www.fundacionzt.org/ FZT], I released a new version of the [http://activities.sugarlabs.org/en-US/sugar/addon/4555 Nutrition activity]. Also, in the spirit of eating my own dog food, as usual I gave my talks in India using Turtle Art. In the process, I uncovered some corner cases in some of the new features I had introduced in Version 154. [http://activities.sugarlabs.org/en-US/sugar/addon/4027 Version 156] has some bug fixes.
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| 3. I just got the galley back from the publisher of a book I am writing (with Chuck Kane), [http://www.amazon.com/Learning-Change-World-Social-Impact/dp/0230337317 ''Learning to Change the World,''] about OLPC. I hope to do justice to the project.
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| === In the community === | | === In the community === |
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| 4. There are plans to hold the next [http://olpcsf.org/ OLPC SF summit] in San Francisco the weekend of October 19-21. We are looking into organizing a Sugar Camp ''following'' the summit. | | 4. There are plans to hold the next OLPC SF summit in San Francisco the weekend of October 19-21. We are holding a Sugar Camp ''following'' the summit (Oct 22-24). Please register at [http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Sugarcamp_SF_2012]. |
|
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| === Tech Talk === | | === Tech Talk === |
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| Misc.
| | 5. Simon Schampijer announced the "I am a GTK+ 3 shell" release of Sugar and the Sugar toolkit (See http://download.sugarlabs.org/sources/sucrose/glucose/sugar/sugar-0.97.3.tar.bz2). |
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| | 6. Daniel Drake announced that a new 13.1.0 development build is available (This one comes with the first development release of the GTK-3 port of Sugar and probably a fair number of bugs for you to help us find and solve.) See http://wiki.laptop.org/go/13.1.0 |
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| * The last of Hippo is removed from the shell!!
| | 7. Thomas Gilliard reports at there is a new live CD of Sugar on openSUSE available that incorporates 0.96.2, the current "stable" version of Sugar. ([[OpenSUSE#openSUSE_12.2-sugar_0.96.2]], [http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/dramwang:/images-unstable/images/iso/sugar.i686-0.3.0-Build1.2.iso iso]) |
| * Work on 13.1 is under way.
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| === Sugar Labs === | | === Sugar Labs === |
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| Visit our [http://planet.sugarlabs.org planet] for more updates about Sugar and Sugar deployments. | | Visit our [http://planet.sugarlabs.org planet] for more updates about Sugar and Sugar deployments. |
| | |
| | === Personal Note === |
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| | On Monday, September 10, I became a grandfather. Looking forward to some Turtle Blocks fun with Theo Max in a few years. |
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| | [[Image:TheoMax.jpg|300]] |
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| == Community News archive == | | == Community News archive == |