Archive/Current Events/2011-07-09

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Sugar Digest

1. A disconcerting past vision of the future of learning can be found in the archives of the Bibliothèque Nationale (French National Library) website (See [1]): efficient learning equated to efficient transfer of information. Perhaps a little less unsettling is the vision of personal transportation ([2]), although I am still very happy using my 19th century transportation technology, the bicycle. Seriously, one-to-one computing is first and foremost about learning: kids learning; teachers learning; communities learning. Gary Stager, one of the early advocates of one to one does a nice job of articulating a vision of learning at a recent discussion at the Omar Dengo Foundation in Costa Rica (See [3]).

2. Under the leadership of Chris Leonard, the Translation Team has been engaged in upstream and downstream outreach. We are now hosting PO files for AbiWord and GNASH (See [4]) and PO files for Waveplace downstream (See [5]). We are also tracking the status of Sugar/OLPC-relevant upstream GNOME and Translation Project localization bits (See [6]). Sugar Labs is now hosting 130 languages and dialects from Acoli to Zulu.

In the community

3. There will be a Turtle Art Day in Costa Rica in July. We may hold simultaneous workshops at other deployments as well: stay tuned (See [7]).

4. Videos from the TedxKids@Brussels workshops are online at [8].

Tech Talk

5. There are a plethora of reasons for us to begin work phasing out Hippo Canvas. (Hippo Canvas is a GNOME-based toolkit used to implement the Sugar Desktop and a few other UI elements.)

  • Fedora is dropping support for Hippo Canvas, so if we want to continue using it, we'll have to maintain it ourselves;
  • Hippo Canvas won't be supported in gtk3.0 and will thus impede our efforts to migrate Sugar; and
  • Hippo Canvas does not support GNOME accessibility features, making it difficult to leverage the broader community's accessibility efforts.

Tomeu Vizoso made a branch of Sugar last year and began efforts to remove Hippo Canvas from the Sugar Desktop. I am picking up where he left off, in part motivated by the need to make some changes to the Journal Detail View in order to accommodate the 800x480 resolution display used on the Okidata laptop being given to teachers in Uruguay. In parallel Daniel Drake is jumping head first into the Sugar Toolkit.

Sugar Labs

Gary Martin has generated a SOM from the past few weeks of discussion on the IAEP mailing list.

Visit our planet [9] for more updates about Sugar and Sugar deployments.