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. A dear friend and mentor, Henry Aristide “Red” Boucher, died yesterday at the age of 88. Red taught me never to say never. His energy and enthusiasm were infectious and his capacity to do the right thing was boundless. I'll miss him.
2. Thanks to the extraordinary efforts of Sebastian Dziallas and the Sugar community, Sugar Labs announces the availability of Sugar on a Stick, codenamed "Strawberry". It features the latest version of the Sugar desktop environment—Version 0.84—and a number of additional activities, providing a great learning experience for new and experienced users. For more information and instructions—how to put SoaS on your USB key or how to deploy it—please refer to our release notes.
Help Wanted
3. Lionel Laske has asked for help with the French version of the Sugar FLOSS manual. He is happy to announce the results of their efforts.
4. There is a new page in the wiki, What could I do in an hour?, for collecting ideas for quick contributions. Please add your ideas.
5. Coming up this week: Sugar at Linuxtag (24–27 June in Berlin). The marketing team has made a great banner to draw attention to our booth.
6. Also, Sugar at FOSSED in Bethel, Maine, 24–26 June. Caroline Meeks and I will be running a three-hour Sugar workshop for teachers.
7. And Sugar at NECC in Washington DC, 28 June–1 July. Mike Lee, Jeff Elkner and others from the Washington DC area will be representing Sugar Labs.
8. Squeakfest will be held in Los Angeles 10–12 August and in Porto Alegre 23–25 Julho.
9. There is an on-going discussion about setting up a program similar to the Fedora Ambassadors program to help facilitate more community involvement in Sugar. Sugar "Facilitators" would:
- Represent Sugar to the wider public
- Help spread the word about Sugar
- Be a point of contact for local community members and channel the feedback to the Sugar community
- Help recruit contributors
- Think of creative ways for promoting Sugar in your region
Tech Talk
10. Tomeu Vizoso has been making great progress on improving support for Gnash/Flash based activities within Sugar.
11. David Van Assche started a thread on personalisation and collaboration. The gist of the discussion is that we should be able to enhance many of the collaboration and evaluation scenarios by capturing and sharing information about user preferences and activities. Please join the discussion as this could be an important topic for Sugar 0.86.
12. A few weeks ago, I mentioned that Nexcopy had donated a USB replicator to Sugar Labs. Caroline and I have successfully used the replcator to make Sugar on a Stick keys—we'll be bringing the system with us to FOSSED this week. We plan to use it at the Gardner Elementary School this summer as well.
13. Eric Bachard reports on http://planet.go-oo.org/ that starting in July there will be a new collaboration between OpenOffice.org Education Project and Epitech Paris. Thomas Fontenay and Abdelkader Bellabes will work on a forked version of OpenOffice.org, named OOo4Kids, for performance improvement on low-power machines, like XO or gdium.
14. Manusheel Gupta reports the release of SocialCalc 0.8.3g for the Sugar environment. Please try SocialCalc.xo and share your feedback. Many thanks to Dan Bricklin, Luke Closs, K.S. Preeti, Nicholas Doiron, Claudia Urrea, and Vijit Singh.
Note to developers: K.S. Preeti has compiled a manual for programmers for SocialCalc.
15. Last week, I mentioned that I had modified Mitchel Charity's Ruler activity to look up the screen resolution so that it would render properly on non-OLPC-XO displays. I had been parsing xdpyinfo to get the display resolution. Tomeu recommended that I use gtk.gdk.screen_width_mm() instead. Alas, it turns out that neither method is returning the proper screen resolution (either from within Sugar or otherwise) on any of the machines I have been using. Back to square one.
Sugar Labs
16. Gary Martin has generated a SOM from the past week of discussion on the IAEP mailing list (Please see SOM).
An archive of this digest is available.
Planet
The Sugar Labs Planet is found here.
Sugar in the news
| 26 Jun 2009 |
Ars Technica – [http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2009/06/sugar-on-a-stick-brings-sweet-taste-of-linux-to-classrooms.ars
Sugar on a Stick brings sweet taste of Linux to classrooms]
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| 24 Jun 2009 |
BBC – OLPC software to power aging PCs
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| 24 Jun 2009 |
Technology Review – $100 Laptop Becomes a $5 PC
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| 15 Jun 2009 |
TechSavvyKids – Episode 10 FOSSVT: Sugar on a Stick (audio)
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| 10 Jun 2009 |
LWN.net – Sugar moves from the shadow of OLPC
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| 27 May 2009 |
LWN.net – Activities and the move to context-oriented desktops (subscriber link)
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| 27 May 2009 |
Business Wire – Dailymotion Launches Support for Open Video Formats and Video HTML Tag
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| 29 Apr 2009 |
El Mercurio – Así se vivió la fiesta del software libre
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| 27 Apr 2009 |
ostatic – Sugar on a Stick: Good for Kids' Minds (and School Budgets)
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| 25 Apr 2009 |
Free Software Magazine – The Bittersweet Facts about OLPC and Sugar
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| 24 Apr 2009 |
Ars Technica – First taste: Sugar on a Stick learning platform
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| 22 Apr 2009 |
Betanews – Beta of Live USB Sugar OS opens
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| 27 Mar 2009 |
Mass High Tech – Google promotes summer open-source internships
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| 18 Mar 2009 |
Metropolis – A Good Argument
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| 16 Mar 2009 |
Laptop Magazine – Sugar Labs’ New Version of Sugar Learning Platform Is Netbook and PC Ready
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| 16 Mar 2009 |
Market Watch – Sugar Labs Nonprofit Announces New Version of Sugar Learning Platform for Children, Runs on Netbooks and PCs
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| 14 Feb 2009 |
OLPC Learning Club – DC – Learning Learning on a Stick
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| 05 Feb 2009 |
xconomy – Sugar Beyond the XO Laptop: Walter Bender on OLPC, Sucrose 0.84, and “Sugar on a Stick”
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| 26 Jan 2009 |
Linus Magazine – Sugar Defies OLPC Cutbacks
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| 19 Jan 2009 |
Feeding the Penguins – The status of Sugar, post-OLPC
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| 16 Jan 2009 |
OLPC News – Sugar on Acer Aspire One & Thin Client via LTSP
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| 12 Jan 2009 |
Bill Kerr – thoughts about olpc cutbacks
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| 07 Jan 2009 |
Ars Technica – OLPC downsizes half of its staff, cuts Sugar development
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| 06 Jan 2009 |
OLPC News – An Inside Look at how Microsoft got XP on the XO
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| 30 Dec 2008 |
OLPC News – Sugar Labs Status at Six Months
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| 22 Dec 2008 |
The GNOME Project – Sugar Labs, the nonprofit behind the OLPC software, is joining the GNOME Foundation
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| 16 Dec 2008 |
Feeding the Penguins – Sugar git repository change
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| 14 Dec 2008 |
NPR – Laptop Deal Links Rural Peru To Opportunity, Risk (Part 2)
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| 13 Dec 2008 |
NPR – Laptops May Change The Way Rural Peru Learns (Part 1)
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| 09 Dec 2008 |
SFC – Sugar Labs joins Conservancy
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| 31 Oct 2008 |
Linux Devices – An OLPC dilemma: Linux or Windows?
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| 10 Oct 2008 |
Feeding the Penguin – Sugar on Ubuntu
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| 21 Sep 2008 |
Groklaw – Interview with Walter Bender of Sugar Labs
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| 17 Sep 2008 |
Bill Kerr – Sugar Labs
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| 16 Sep 2008 |
Open Source – Sugar everywhere
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| 28 Aug 2008 |
OLPC News – An answer to Walter Bender's question 22
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| 20 Aug 2008 |
OLPC News – Sugarize it: Intel Classmate 2
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| 08 Aug 2008 |
Investor's Business Daily – 'Learning' Vs. Laptop Was Issue
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| 06 Aug 2008 |
OLPC News – Twenty-three Questions on Technology and Education
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| 18 Jul 2008 |
Bill Kerr – evaluating Sugar in the developed world
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| 28 Jun 2008 |
OLPC News – A Cutting Edge Sugar User Interface Demo
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| 18 Jun 2008 |
PC World – OLPC Spin-off Developing UI for Intel's Classmate PC
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| 17 Jun 2008 |
Datamation – If Business Succeeds with GNU/Linux, Why Not OLPC?
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| 11 Jun 2008 |
LinuxInsider – The Sweetness of Collaborative Learning
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| 06 Jun 2008 |
Bill Kerr – untangling Free, Sugar, and Constructionism
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| 06 Jun 2008 |
Open Education – Walter Bender Discusses Sugar Labs Foundation
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| 06 Jun 2008 |
BusinessWeek – OLPC: The Educational Philosophy Controversy
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| 05 Jun 2008 |
Code Culture – The Distraction Machine
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| 05 Jun 2008 |
BusinessWeek – OLPC: The Open-Source Controversy
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| 27 May 2008 |
The New York Times – Why Walter Bender Left One Laptop Per Child
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| 26 May 2008 |
Ars Technica – OLPC software maker splits from X0 hardware, goes solo
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| 22 May 2008 |
BetaNews – Linux start-up Sugar Labs in informal talks with four laptop makers
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| 16 May 2008 |
OSTATIC – OLPC's Open Source Sugar Platform Aims for New Hardware
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| 16 May 2008 |
PCWorld – Bender Forms Group to Promote OLPC's Sugar UI
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| 16 May 2008 |
MHT – Bender jumps from OLPC, founds Sugar Labs
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| 16 May 2008 |
News.com – Sugar Labs will make OLPC interface available for Eee PC, others
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| 16 May 2008 |
Feeding the Peguins – The future of Sugar
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| 16 May 2008 |
Sugar list – A few thoughts on SugarLabs
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| 16 May 2008 |
xconomy – Bender Creates Sugar Labs—New Foundation to Adapt OLPC’s Laptop Interface for Other Machines
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| 16 May 2008 |
BBC – '$100 laptop' platform moves on
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| 15 May 2008 |
OLPC wiki – Dual-boot XO Claim: OLPC will not work to port Sugar to Windows.
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| 16 May 2008 |
Softpedia – Bender Launches Sugar Labs for Better Development of OLPC's Sugar UI
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Press releases
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