Dextrose

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The deployments' XO Operating System

Dextrose is a Sugar distribution for the XO-1 and XO-1.5 jointly developed by Activity Central, Paraguay Educa, Plan Ceibal and Sugar Labs in collaboration with the OLPC and Sugar community.

Our focus is stability and usability in the classroom, but we've also merged some new features contributed by deployments and freelance contributors.

New features in Dextrose

Backport of Sugar 0.88 (Bernie Innocenti)
Journal sorting options (Andrés Ambrois)
Intuitive monitoring of system resources (Anish Mangal)
Journal Backup/restore to removable devices (Martin Abente, Esteban Arias)
Journal Backup/restore to schoolserver (Martin Abente)
Protected activities support ( Martin Abente)
Improved GSM/3G handling (Daniel Castelo, Martin Abente)
Tabbed browsing (Anish Mangal)
Virtual keyboard (Esteban Arias)
Accessibility features (Esteban Arias)
Journal repair functionality (Esteban Arias)
Fast switching between touchpad and pen-tablet modes (Walter Bender)
OLPC Microformat support in activity updater (Akash Gangil, Anish Mangal)
Ad-hoc Networks (Simon Schampijer)
Ability to reissue registration to schoolserver (Martin Abente)
Extensive field testing (Bernie Innocenti)

Dextrose 1

This is a Release Candidate. This build has been tested in two classrooms for over one month. We believe them to be stable and ready for general use. If no further issues are discovered, the RC will become our final Dextrose 1 release.

Hardware	OS Images	Size	Date
XO-1	os373pyg.img os373pyg.crc	518MB	Aug 15 2010
XO-1.5	os373pyg.zd	557MB	Aug 15 2010

Want to help us with testing? Check out our latest development builds.

Installation

XO-1

First, ensure that your laptop is unlocked.
Download both osNNNpyg.img and osNNNpyg.crc to the root directory of a USB stick
Drop to the "ok" prompt by pressing ESC repeatedly during boot
Type the command: copy-nand u:\osNNNpyg.img followed by ENTER
Wait for the display to fill in with color and the "ok" prompt to return
Type the command reboot followed by ENTER
The XO will reboot, finish writing, reboot itself, and take you to the naming and color choice process
During the reboots, keep the charger connected to allow OFW to self-update

XO-1.5

First, ensure that your laptop is unlocked.
Download osNNNpyg.zd to the root directory of a USB stick
Drop to the "ok" prompt by pressing ESC repeatedly during boot
Type the command: fs-update u:\osNNNpyg.zd followed by ENTER
Wait for the display to fill in with color and the "ok" prompt to return
Type the command reboot followed by ENTER
The XO will reboot and take you to the naming and color choice process

Using Dextrose in your deployment

A few customizations make this image somewhat deployment-specific:

Limited language support: in order to save space, only English and Spanish translations are included.
Image is signed with the Paraguay deployment keys. Laptops from other regions need to be unlocked in order to load this image.
The software update control panel icon checks for new activities on the Paraguay Educa wiki.
The Browse home page contains the Paraguay Educa logo and links to our website.

We may find the time to release slightly modified images to meet the needs of deployments interested in upgrading.

More importantly, we're happy to help other deployments produce their own OS images independently of us, thus exploiting the Freedom #1 provided by Free Software.

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