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. (Also visit planet.sugarlabs.org.)

Sugar Digest

1. The Sucrose 0.84 release is now official! Simon Schampijer and Tomeu Vizoso have put together comprehensive release notes (See http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/DevelopmentTeam/Release/Releases/Sucrose/0.84). The long list of new features is impressive. And Sean Daly is spreading the word, having launched a major media blitz, a first for Sugar Labs, that has already gotten Sugar 0.84 exposure on Market Watch, Reuters, and Forbes. More to come.

2. In preparation for the media campaign, there has been a lot of work done behind the scenes to make the wiki more easily searchable and navigable. Fred Grosse has been the driving force behind a wiki reorganization, which includes a subpage menu for each of the major sections. Plus, he has eliminated most of the CamelCase in the wiki that was interfering with search.

3. Aleksey Lim is making sure that all of our efforts are being put to good use. His ost recent magic is a revamped Sugar for Caixa Mágica, the distribution used by Project Magellan (Magalhães) and numerous other projects. Meanwhile, Sasche Silbe is working on keeping Sugar on Ubuntu up to date.

Community jams, meet-ups, and meetings

4. The OLPC Learning Club – DC is hosting a Family XO Mesh Meetup on Saturday, 21 March 2009.

Help Wanted / Help Received

5. Jameson Quinn and Mel Chua have submitted our Google Summer of Code (GSoC) application. We have 10 mentors and a growing list of project ideas. While the number of interns who will be formally participating in GSoC will be relatively small, the mentoring framework being put into place will have impact above and beyond that one program. For example, Jeff Elkner sent out an email asking for mentoring support for some student projects; he got an overwhelming response from the community. Mentoring is a key to our growth.

Tech Talk

6. Sebastian Dziallas has also been working some magic. He has created a snapshot of the Sugar-on-a-Stick image (SoaS-2) as a virtual machine. (Note that SoaS-2 is the Fedora 11 version of Sugar on a Stick.)

In this tar.gz archive you'll find a .vmdk and a .xml file. The .vmdk file is nothing more than the disk image for VMware. You should be able to import it easily, also in other applications supporting this file type, such as VirtualBox (in which I tested it).
Please be aware that this image is still pre-alpha! It has quite a few

bugs and is certainly not as stable as the SoaS-2 .iso images.

Sebastian has created this image by hand, but will start building them at the same time as the .iso files.

Sugar Labs

7. Gary Martin has generated a SOM from the past week of discussion on the IAEP mailing list (Please see SOM).

Community News archive

An archive of this digest is available.

Planet

The Sugar Labs Planet is found here.

Sugar in the news

16 Mar 2009 Laptop Magazine – Sugar Labs’ New Version of Sugar Learning Platform Is Netbook and PC Ready
16 Mar 2009 Market Watch – Sugar Labs Nonprofit Announces New Version of Sugar Learning Platform for Children, Runs on Netbooks and PCs
14 Feb 2009 OLPC Learning Club – DC – Learning Learning on a Stick
05 Feb 2009 xconomy – Sugar Beyond the XO Laptop: Walter Bender on OLPC, Sucrose 0.84, and “Sugar on a Stick”
26 Jan 2009 Linus Magazine – Sugar Defies OLPC Cutbacks
19 Jan 2009 Feeding the Penguins – The status of Sugar, post-OLPC
16 Jan 2009 OLPC News – Sugar on Acer Aspire One & Thin Client via LTSP
12 Jan 2009 Bill Kerr – thoughts about olpc cutbacks
07 Jan 2009 Ars Technica – OLPC downsizes half of its staff, cuts Sugar development
06 Jan 2009 OLPC News – An Inside Look at how Microsoft got XP on the XO
30 Dec 2008 OLPC News – Sugar Labs Status at Six Months
22 Dec 2008 The GNOME Project – Sugar Labs, the nonprofit behind the OLPC software, is joining the GNOME Foundation
16 Dec 2008 Feeding the Penguins – Sugar git repository change
14 Dec 2008 NPR – Laptop Deal Links Rural Peru To Opportunity, Risk (Part 2)
13 Dec 2008 NPR – Laptops May Change The Way Rural Peru Learns (Part 1)
09 Dec 2008 SFC – Sugar Labs joins Conservancy
31 Oct 2008 Linux Devices – An OLPC dilemma: Linux or Windows?
10 Oct 2008 Feeding the Penguin – Sugar on Ubuntu
21 Sep 2008 Groklaw – Interview with Walter Bender of Sugar Labs
17 Sep 2008 Bill Kerr – Sugar Labs
16 Sep 2008 Open Source – Sugar everywhere
28 Aug 2008 OLPC News – An answer to Walter Bender's question 22
20 Aug 2008 OLPC News – Sugarize it: Intel Classmate 2
08 Aug 2008 Investor's Business Daily – 'Learning' Vs. Laptop Was Issue
06 Aug 2008 OLPC News – Twenty-three Questions on Technology and Education
18 Jul 2008 Bill Kerr – evaluating Sugar in the developed world
28 Jun 2008 OLPC News – A Cutting Edge Sugar User Interface Demo
18 Jun 2008 PC World – OLPC Spin-off Developing UI for Intel's Classmate PC
17 Jun 2008 Datamation – If Business Succeeds with GNU/Linux, Why Not OLPC?
11 Jun 2008 LinuxInsider – The Sweetness of Collaborative Learning
06 Jun 2008 Bill Kerr – untangling Free, Sugar, and Constructionism
06 Jun 2008 Open Education – Walter Bender Discusses Sugar Labs Foundation
06 Jun 2008 BusinessWeek – OLPC: The Educational Philosophy Controversy
05 Jun 2008 Code Culture – The Distraction Machine
05 Jun 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

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