Dextrose

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Dextrose - Deployments' XO Operating System

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

The focus of this build is stability and usability in a classroom environment. While there wasn't much time for new development, we've merged a few features contributed by other deployments and freelance contributors:

Journal sorting options (aa)
CPU/Memory display (m_anish)
Journal Backup/restore to removable devices (tch, esteban)
Journal Backup/restore to schoolserver (tch)
Protected activities support (tch)
Improved GSM/3G handling (tch, dcastelo)
Tabbed browsing (m_anish)
Accessibility features (esteban)
Journal repair functionality (esteban)
Fast switching between touchpad and pen-tablet modes (wbender)
OLPC Microformat support in activity updater (gangil) (pending)

Download development builds

Release date	Milestone	XO-1	XO-1.5
May 26	Alpha1	os240py.img os240py.crc
Jun 12	Alpha2	os258py.img os258py.crc	os257py.zd
Jun 16		os260py.img os260py.crc	os261py.zd
Jun 28	Beta1	os284py.img os284py.crc	os286py.zd
Jul 04		os295py.img os295py.crc	os297py.zd
Jul 08	Beta2	os300py.img os300py.crc	os299py.zd

Installation

XO-1

First, ensure that your laptop is unlocked.
Download osNNNpy.img and osNNNpy.crc to the root directory of a USB stick
Drop to the "ok" prompt by pressing ESC repetedly during boot
Type the command: copy-nand u:\osNNNpy.img followed by ENTER
During the next reboot, keep the charger connected to allow OFW to self-update

Also check these detailed instructions.

XO-1.5

Download osNNNpy.zd to the root directory of a USB stick
Drop to the "ok" prompt by pressing ESC repetedly during boot
Type the command: fs-update u:\osNNNpy.zd followed by ENTER

Also check these detailed instructions.

Testing

Besides community testing and field testing, we're planning to reuse and extend the OLPC test plan adopted in release 8.2.0 (aka os801): http://wiki.laptop.org/go/TestPlan_8.2.0

Feedback from the entire community is appreciated. Bugs belonging to upstream components should be filed in the usual trackers:

Sugar and activities: http://bugs.sugarlabs.org/
Fedora 11: http://bugzilla.redhat.com/
Drivers and OLPC customizations: http://dev.laptop.org/
Bugs specific to this build: http://trac.paraguayeduca.org/

Using this build

A few customizations make this image somewhat deployment-specific:

Limited language support: to save space, we've included only English and Spanish translations.

Image signed with the Paraguay deployment keys. Laptops from other regions need to be unlocked in order to accept this image.

The software update control panel icon checks for new activities on our wiki rather than on laptop.org.

The Browse home page contains the Paraguay Educa logo and a few links to our website.

We may find the time to release slightly modified images to meet the needs of other OLPC deployments interested in upgrading to Sugar 0.88.

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.

How to join development

See the Getting Involved page and our Build System documentation.