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. An archive of this digest is available here.
Sugar Digest
1. "The vision thing": There has been some discussion about the Sugar vision in regard to both its clarity and the degree to which it is being promoted (Please see the email thread). While there is some divergence of opinion about the breadth of the Sugar Labs mission—ranging from a strict focus on collaboration tools to a broad focus on everything necessary for successful one-laptop-per-child deployments—there was consensus that we are getting the message out that Sugar is alive and kicking; there is still a wide-spread impression that the FOSS community has abandoned Sugar because OLPC is working with Microsoft on Windows XP. We need to let the world know that: (a) there is a vibrant Sugar community; (b) that OLPC is still behind Sugar; (c) other hardware vendors are beginning to adopt Sugar; and (d) the FOSS Sugar learning platform offers encourages the direct appropriation of ideas in whatever realm the learner is exploring: music, browsing, reading, writing, programming, graphics, etc.—they are able to engage in debugging both their personal expression and the very tools that they use for that expression.
2. Try Sugar: An important aspect of Sugar outreach is easy access to Sugar itself. We are targeting grassroots adoption (in addition to top-down "sales" coupled to programs like One Laptop per Child or Intel regional or national initialives), so we need to make it easier for small groups to try Sugar. This includes community support of the existing LiveUSB, LiveCD, and Appliance efforts, but also further consideration (and documentation) of the various hardware one might find in the field and more detailed instructions on setting up classrooms (groups) of machines working together. Towards that end, we are beginning work on a "Try Sugar" section in the wiki (Please help us flesh out Documentation/Try_Sugar), which includes a matrix of "tried and ready" solutions from the field. To be able to say to a teacher, here is a step-by-step guide to how you can repurpose (or overlay) the computers you have access to in the classroom to run Sugar will go a long way towards fostering growth of Sugar.
3. "Unexpected" suggestions: Michael Stone wrote up some suggestions regarding "the Work of Sugar", his reactions to sugar's architecture, design, and implementation. It was the basis of an in-depth discussion the Sugar mailing list (Please see [1]).
4. Proposal: There has been a back-and-forth discussion about establishing an Activity developers mailing list separate from the Sugar developers mailing list (Please see [2]). It has been suggested that Activity developers need a more focused list to alert them to needs specific to activity developers, such as changes to APIs, a forum for soliciting help, etc. The downside of course is the fragmentation and distraction of yet another mailing list.
5. Outreach: Stormy Peters, executive director, GNOME Foundation, has blogged about Sugar Labs (Please see Stormy's Corner) and has pledged to step up the level of awareness of Sugar within the GNOME community. (Sugar has its foundation in the GNOME toolkit.) Morgan Collett has been actively promoting Sugar within the Ubuntu community and Greg DeKoeningsberg has been very helpful in promoting Sugar within the Fedora community.
6. Minutes: We had a meeting of the acting Sugar oversight board on Friday, 8 August 2008. Minutes and a log of the conversation are in the wiki (Please see 1 August 2008 minutes). One important decision reached at the meeting was to open up nominations for postions on the to-be-elected seven-member board over the first two weeks of August (until the 16th) and to hold an election over the final two weeks of August (from the 17th to the 30th). Please send nominations to "walter AT sugarlabs.org"; feel free to nominate yourself.
Community jams and meetups
7. Openminds: Is anyone planning to attend the K–12 Openminds meeting in Indianapolis (Please see http://www.k12openminds.org/)? It'd be a great forum to promote Sugar.
8. Physics jam: Brian Jordan is organizing a physics game competition 29–31 August in Cambridge, MA. There will be categories for remote entries, youth, professional, and independent game developers. Brian reports that will be XOs and other sweet prizes for the best entries. Please help to spread the word (Please see http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Physics_Jam).
9. Organización del 2do Ceibal Jam: Pablo Flores reports that there will be a jam at the Catholic University (UCU) in Uruguay over two weekends (Saturday 30 August and 6 September). Please contact Pablo ("pflores2 AT gmail.com") for more details.
10. Book sprint: There will be a book sprint in Austin, TX from 24–29 August. Please contact Adam Hyde ("adam AT flossmanuals.net") for more details.
Tech Talk
9. Sugar-jhbuild: I finally managed to get my xsessions configured so that I could run both Sugar as installed by apt-get sugar and the latest jpyride version I built by hand using sugar-jhbuild (Please see xsession for the details).
10. Sugar appliance: Bryan Kearney has built a Sugar appliance based upon the Thincrust toolkit (Please see Thincrust where you'll learn that "an appliance is a pre-configured application and operating system bundle"). The directions for using the appliance are:
- Download http://sugar.s3.amazonaws.com/sugarAppliance.tar.gz
- Unzip and untar it
- Run virt-image sugar.xml
- At the login, select "Autologin"
11. Develop: Jameson Chema Quinn has made a new version of Develop (Please see Develop). Jameson recommends you use a recent Joyride (> 2170).
12. Road-map updates: Marco Pesenti Gritti announced that letting the code freeze for this release slip. "With the current speed of development of the OLPC release it would just be impractical." Marco has started a tentative 0.84 schedule (Please see ReleaseTeam/Roadmap/0.84).
Marco is finally back working full time on OLPC. He spent this week fixing blocker bugs for the next release, doing a lot of triage and several patch reviews. He implemented an improved logic handling new windows in the Browse activity, which, while not yet ideal, should allow all the web sites that Uruguay has had problems with to work correctly. Marco also tracked down and fixed an infinite loop in the shell. Finally, with Tomeu Vizoso, he solved a problem with the web widget size allocation, which is likely to have caused several problems.
13. Sucrose Release Candidate 1: The new Sucrose 0.81.5 Development Release is out. Thanks to all the contributors! Simon Schampijer reports that we now have one more release before code freeze (excluding more changes to the road map). Please test, give feedback, and file bugs (Please see Sucrose 81.5).
Simon has been implementing a mechanism for feedback from 'Register' process in the form of an alert that is displayed in the Home view.
14. Computer vision: Nirav Patel is soliciting feedback regarding what computer vision should it be in regard to "gaming, input, accessibility, education, or anything else" (Please see http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/games/2008-July/000664.html). He gives some examples at http://eclecti.cc/olpc.
15. Etoys: Takashi Yamamiya reports that there is new release of Etoys, which includes Tubes, a Pango speed-up, and a fix to the clipboard.
Sugar Labs
16. Infrastructure: Bernie Innocenti reports that on Monday, the following services were moved to Solarsail:
- mailing lists
- wiki.sugarlabs.org
- email aliases forwarding
Additional services that we might want to migrate from dev.laptop.org include:
- git
- trac
- the sugar@ mailing list
- wiki pages related to Sugar
- pootle
We decided to wait moving these until we get the full backups running and the machine racked in its final home.
Services still hosted by develer.com include:
- api.sugarlabs.org
- courses.sugrlabs.org
- developer accounts
- nameservers
- user drop box for downloads.sugarlabs.org
The above services will go on our second machine as soon if we get it racked. Develer is glad to keep them as long as needed.
Thanks to Bernie and Ivan Krstić.
17. Self-organizing map (SOM): Gary Martin has generated another SOM from the past week of discussion on the IAEP mailing list (Please see Image:2008-July-19-25-som.jpg). The verbs are prominent: doing; programming; learning; and education; math; etc.
Sugar in the news
Press releases
| 15 May 2008 | Sugar Labs/Announcing Sugar Labs |