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. Yesterday was Day One of Linux Conference Australia (LCA), being held in Hobart, Tasmania. I mostly hung out in the sessions on the business side of free and open source. David Rowe did a nice job advocating for open hardware—something we never were quite able to achieve when I was at OLPC. Most of the speakers delivered pragmatic talks: how to engage with government (Pia Waugh), with large companies (Bdale Garbee), marketing (Joe Brokmeier), etc. The last speaker of the day, Lawrence Crumpton, talked about Microsoft's embracing of open source; his talk was titled Did Hell Freeze Over? Alas, the title was the highlight of the talk. The efforts he described as successes were all shallow and clumsy efforts at engagement with lots of strings attached. I don't think he once mentioned "free as in speech" and he essentially delegated FOSS efforts to the non-commercial sector. I, for one, remain skeptical. Actions will speak louder than words.

Pia and I did get started on a discussion about how best to move forward with one laptop per child in the region. She is rightly still enamored with the OLPC-XO-1 hardware, as it meets the needs imposed by the harsh environmental conditions faced in many of her potential deployment sites. We discussed strategies for building sustainable local support and the need for global cooperation in order to increase efficiency. We'll keep brainstorming. We've got a Birds of a Feather session at the end of the week that promises to bring more minds to the table as well.

I had dinner last night with Rob Savoye, among others. Rob continues to make progress on Gnash. He has some very nice results on the XO hardware—yes you can play Youtube videos and yes you can run a stand-alone SWF player for which we talked about putting together a simple Sugar wrapper. Rob's other big project right now involves finding workarounds to the plethora of proprietary codecs that encumber FOSS projects.

2. Occasionally my tendency towards addictive behavior emerges. I haven't been able to kick the habit of coding. I started working on the portfolio fork of Turtle Art last week during XO Camp and I wrote Python across the Pacific and I stayed up much to late last night after visiting some pubs coding. In the spirit of "eat your own dogfood", my goal is to get things into sufficient shape so as to be able to give my LCA talk using Turtle Art. I am close, but my Python and GTK skills are still pretty lacking. You can track my progress in gitorious—I am making frequent commits—and feel free to submit patches!! And my apologies to everyone for lack of eye contact.

3. Gary Martin has being doing some great work in the wiki on our Getting Involved page (See Sugar_Labs/GettingInvolved). Anyone want to tackle our About page, which is not very helpful.

Community jams, meet-ups, and meetings

4. As mentioned above, on Friday afternoon, 23 January, is an OLPC BOF at linux.conf.au in Hobart. It is an open discussion to explore strategies for community development and paths forward for OLPC and Sugar in the region. We expect attendees from Australia, New Zealand, and the Pacific.

5. David Nalley blogged about Fedora and Sugar at the Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts January meeting this past week. He reports lots of enthusiasm now that getting involved with OLPC development is as easy as getting involved with Fedora.

Help Wanted

6. Sugar Labs will be participating in Google Summer of Code. We are soliciting projects and mentors. Details soon.

Tech Talk

7. As several people have pointed out, Gdium is donating laptops to developers (See Gdium) who might be interested in working on Sugar. The machines run Mandriva (which also runs on the Mobilis that is being considered for use in Brazil). Aleksey Lim has Sugar working on Mandriva (SeeCommunity/Distributions/Mandriva) and we hope to have Sugar packaged as part of the next release of Mandriva.

8. Tomeu Vizoso reports that he, along with Gary Martin and Ben Schwartz, has been "tricked" into starting a new mind-mapping Activity (See http://git.sugarlabs.org/projects/mindmap). Some of the interesting ideas that they are exploring are:

  • the view widget can be embedded in a GNOME application
  • collaboration using both Telepathy and Groupthink, working both in GNOME and in Sugar

This could be a model for making Sugar Activities run both within and outside of Sugar.

9. Recent software updates:

  • TAPortfolio-3
  • calculate-28
  • chat-62
  • read-63
  • etoys 4.0.2205
  • Etoys-99
  • sugar-presence-service-0.83.3
  • sugar-datastore-0.83.2
  • telepathy-gabble 0.7.18

Sugar Labs

10. Gary Martin has generated another 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

26 Jan 2009 Linus MagazineSugar Defies OLPC Cutbacks
19 Jan 2009 Feeding the PenguinsThe status of Sugar, post-OLPC
16 Jan 2009 OLPC NewsSugar on Acer Aspire One & Thin Client via LTSP
12 Jan 2009 Bill Kerrthoughts about olpc cutbacks
07 Jan 2009 Ars TechnicaOLPC downsizes half of its staff, cuts Sugar development
06 Jan 2009 OLPC NewsAn Inside Look at how Microsoft got XP on the XO
30 Dec 2008 OLPC NewsSugar Labs Status at Six Months
22 Dec 2008 The GNOME ProjectSugar Labs, the nonprofit behind the OLPC software, is joining the GNOME Foundation
16 Dec 2008 Feeding the PenguinsSugar git repository change
14 Dec 2008 NPRLaptop Deal Links Rural Peru To Opportunity, Risk (Part 2)
13 Dec 2008 NPRLaptops May Change The Way Rural Peru Learns (Part 1)
09 Dec 2008 SFCSugar Labs joins Conservancy
31 Oct 2008 Linux DevicesAn OLPC dilemma: Linux or Windows?
10 Oct 2008 Feeding the PenguinSugar on Ubuntu
21 Sep 2008 GroklawInterview with Walter Bender of Sugar Labs
17 Sep 2008 Bill KerrSugar Labs
16 Sep 2008 Open SourceSugar everywhere
28 Aug 2008 OLPC NewsAn answer to Walter Bender's question 22
20 Aug 2008 OLPC NewsSugarize it: Intel Classmate 2
08 Aug 2008 Investor's Business Daily'Learning' Vs. Laptop Was Issue
06 Aug 2008 OLPC NewsTwenty-three Questions on Technology and Education
18 Jul 2008 Bill Kerrevaluating Sugar in the developed world
28 Jun 2008 OLPC NewsA Cutting Edge Sugar User Interface Demo
18 Jun 2008 PC WorldOLPC Spin-off Developing UI for Intel's Classmate PC
17 Jun 2008 DatamationIf Business Succeeds with GNU/Linux, Why Not OLPC?
11 Jun 2008 LinuxInsiderThe Sweetness of Collaborative Learning
06 Jun 2008 Bill Kerruntangling Free, Sugar, and Constructionism
06 Jun 2008 Open EducationWalter Bender Discusses Sugar Labs Foundation
06 Jun 2008 BusinessWeekOLPC: The Educational Philosophy Controversy
05 Jun 2008 Code CultureThe Distraction Machine
05 Jun 2008 BusinessWeekOLPC: The Open-Source Controversy
27 May 2008 The New York TimesWhy Walter Bender Left One Laptop Per Child
26 May 2008 Ars TechnicaOLPC software maker splits from X0 hardware, goes solo
22 May 2008 BetaNewsLinux start-up Sugar Labs in informal talks with four laptop makers
16 May 2008 OSTATICOLPC's Open Source Sugar Platform Aims for New Hardware
16 May 2008 PCWorldBender Forms Group to Promote OLPC's Sugar UI
16 May 2008 MHTBender jumps from OLPC, founds Sugar Labs
16 May 2008 News.comSugar Labs will make OLPC interface available for Eee PC, others
16 May 2008 Feeding the PeguinsThe future of Sugar
16 May 2008 Sugar listA few thoughts on SugarLabs
16 May 2008 xconomyBender 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 wikiDual-boot XO Claim: OLPC will not work to port Sugar to Windows.
16 May 2008 SoftpediaBender Launches Sugar Labs for Better Development of OLPC's Sugar UI

Press releases

 9 Dec 2008 Sugar Labs/Sugar Labs joins the SFC
 15 May 2008 Sugar Labs/Announcing Sugar Labs