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.) 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. Milan update: Minutes of the Sugar Labs meeting are posted in the wiki (Please see Sugar_Labs/Meeting_Minutes-30-06-2008). Topics covered in the meeting included:

• Governance and the Software Freedom Conservancy
• What are we (Sugar Labs) trying to accomplish?
• Sugar distributions: what are the issues?
• Sugar Labs look and feel: a graphic design review
• Sugar on mobile phones: is it possible? does it make sense?
• Sugar Labs: models of support
• Fund-raising: how much and from whom?

One byproduct of the meeting was further refinement of the Sugar Labs governance pages in the wiki (Please see Sugar_Labs/Governance) and the accumulation of an initial membership list for Sugar Labs (Please see Sugar_Labs/initial_members_list).

2. Intercambio de experiencias (Exchange of experiences): There is starting to be a nice exchange of classroom experiences among teachers on the olpc-sur mailing list (in Spanish). Teachers helping teachers.

3. Regional efforts: There are a number of people discussing regional programs for Sugar development and support. Such programs are in line with the Sugar Labs vision. It is extremely important to push development and support into the hands of local organizations because: (1) it scales; (2) the detailed knowledge is local; (3) it helps the local economy; (4) it sets in motion independent agencies with a common goal and yet autonomy of action, which leads to innovation. Please bring these discussions to the Education mailing list so that we can leverage each other's ideas.

4. What works? What doesn't?: Roy Zimmermann is working in collaboration with the World Bank on a USAID-funded project to analyze the role of ICT on education in developing countries (If you have examples you think should be included in his survey, please upload them to http://www.ictimpact.org).

Community jams and meetups

5. India Day: There will be an OLPC Day in India on 4 August in a venue to be determined. On the agenda is a discussion on learning by David Cavallo.

Tech Talk

6. Development release: Today (Monday, 7 July) is the date for the next development release. Simon Schampijer asks maintainers to please provide source code tarballs by the end of the day for the following modules:

ReleaseTeam/Roadmap#Glucose_Modules

ReleaseTeam/Roadmap#Fructose_Modules

And to please announce them as explained here:

ReleaseTeam#Module_release

7. SocialCalc: KS Preeti has done a thorough review of the latest release of SocialCalc. Such feedback is enormously helpful to developers. Please help us by reviewing your favorite Activities and filing detailed reports either to the wiki or the Sugar list.

8. Gears: David Van Assche continues to make progress on getting Google Gears running under Sugar.

9. Xterm: Michael Stone posted Blake Setlow's recipe for increasing the font size in an xterm window:

LANG=C xterm -fa "DejaVu LGC Sans Mono" -fs 8 +sb

10. Etoys Quickguides: Ted Kaehler reports that the PDF file containing all of the Etoys QuickGuides is now only 4MB (instead of 22MB) thanks to a suggestion by Tim Falconer (See

11. ReviewBoard: Sayamindu Dasgupta has set up an instance of ReviewBoard at http://xenguest1.laptop.org/ for exploring. A basic workflow for using ReviewBoard is available online ([1]).

12. Misc: Tomeu Vizoso reviewed and pushed out patches this week and has begun working on Journal object transfer. Marco Pesenti Gritti is taking a well-deserved vacation. Daniel Drake addressed issues associated with the Fedora 9 rebase and has some code that brings the Record activity back into a somewhat usable state.

Sugar Labs

13. 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-June-28-July-4-som.jpg).

Sugar in the news

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