Documentation Team/Glossary

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A Sugar Taxonomy

Sweet: The abstract design of the interface
Sweets Distribution: A set of repositories with native packages that compose Basic software of the Harmonic Distribution effort. This is a special, Sugar only, distribution.
Glucose: The base Sugar environment
Fructose: A set of demonstration activities, see Development_Team/Release/Modules#Fructose
Sucrose: The interface, plus a set of demonstration activities
Ribose: The base Linux distribution being used by Sugar
Starch(es): A complete disk image for Sugar

Operating system

operating system (OS): The low-level system that manages the various files, processes, etc. needed to operate the laptop; the OS used by the XO laptop is the RedHat Fedora distribution of Linux.
build: a specific instance of the operating system, designated by category and number; e.g., OLPC Update.1-703; OLPC Joyride-1792; Ubuntu 8.4 Hardy Heron; Fedora 9

Internal storage

datastore: component that manages the access to the data displayed in the Journal; these data are stored in individual files; an index that contains the metadata and speeds up searches

External storage

flash memory device/USB stick/jumpdrive/thumb drive/USB drive: A small, external storage device that plugs into one of the USB ports on a computer. They can store between 16 MB (enough to hold several music files) up to 32 GB (enough to hold multiple high quality full-length movie files) and a wide range in between. Flash drives are easily purchased at any electronic store starting as low as $5 to $10.
SD card: Secure Digital (SD) is a flash (non-volatile) memory card format used in portable devices, including digital cameras, hand-held computers, PDAs, and mobile phones. SD card capacities range from 8 MB to 32 GB.

Networking

mesh network: A wireless mesh network is a communications network made up of radio nodes in which nodes can forward information on behalf of each other so that even nodes that are not in direct radio contact can communicate via nodes that are between them. The collective coverage area of the radio nodes working as a single network becomes a mesh cloud.
infrastructure mode: network connectivity through a Wi-Fi access point, e.g., 802.11b/g
mesh mode: network connectivity through a mesh network, e.g., 802.11s
simple mesh mode: a mesh network that is running between Sugar users without a School Server
school server mesh mode: a mesh network that is mediated by a School Server
presence: a discovery service for finding other Sugar users on a network
jabber: a protocol that Sugar can use for collaboration
tubes: a protocol for passing data between Sugar users
mesh channel: Sugar prefers three channels for communication: 1, 6, and 11; in simple mesh mode, the Sugar users can only see other users on the same channel; in a School Server mesh, users on all channels are visible
access point (AP): an AP is a device that connects wireless communication devices together to form a wireless network. The AP usually connects to a wired network and can relay data between wireless devices and wired devices. Several APs can link together to form a larger network.
mesh portal point: a mesh node that serves as a gateway (portal) to a network external to the mesh

User Interface (UI)

A User Interface is defined by Wikipedia as "the aggregate of means by which people—the users—interact with the system—a particular machine, device, computer program or other complex tools. The user interface provides means of:

Input, allowing the users to manipulate a system
Output, allowing the system to produce the effects of the users' manipulation."

So, the Sugar user interface is all the icons and words and the screen they appear on, in addition to the keyboard, mouse, and touchpad buttons used to interact with those icons and words.

Because, the Sugar learning philosophy strives to integrate every part of the system into a coherent learning tool, we emphasize the learning over other uses, and often substitute Learners for 'Users' when we speak of the people in our community.

Sugar UI: the user interface of the laptop is called “Sugar”; it consists of four views, the Frame, and the Journal
Home view: a view of what activities you are running and other status information;
Group view: a view of your friends with whom you are working on shared projects;
Neighborhood view: a view of who is on the network with you and what activities and content are being shared. The Network view is the starting screen on the XO-1 laptop.;
Activity view: a view used by the current activity that is running on the laptop
Frame: the Frame, which can appear in any view, holds navigation controls, the task bar (of running activities), a list of “buddies” (collaborators), internal & external devices, a clipboard, and notifications.;
Journal: a special activity where you can see your previous work done in other activities. You can also resume the work done at those activities;
toolbox: a user-interface element that appears in the top part of most activities and contains one or more toolbars
toolbar: a user-interface element that can contain several buttons, text entry fields, drop-down menus, etc.; common examples of toolbars include: Activity, View, Edit, et al.
palette: a black box that appears when the mouse hovers over an object; a palette can contain the name of the control, some details about it or a menu of some related actions.

Activities and Content

activity: an application that has an icon in the taskbar, e.g., Write, Record, Browse; Activities engage you in taking a picture, reading a book, creating a page, annotating a page, animating a drawing, making sounds and music, measuring and sensing, sharing your favorites, inviting your friends, surfing on the web, etc...
content: books, music, movies, photographs, drawings, etc. that are created on the computer or downloaded to the computer
content library: content that is created on the computer is accessed through the Journal; preloaded content is stored in a library and is accessed through the Browse activity.
bundle/activity bundle: a “zip” file with a .xo suffix used to package and distribute activities; bundles are installed in ~/Activities
content bundle/collection: a “zip” file with a .xol suffix used to package and distribute content; bundles are installed in ~/Library
roadmap: a plan made up of stages
sugar coat or sugar coating: A process for making Linux apps run under the Sugar desktop (i.e. making them to run in the Sugar interface, without the collaboration and other Sugar integration programmed into them).
sugarizing: A process of re-engineering Linux applications to run as native Sugar activities which take advantage of Sugar's collaboration capabilities and interface.

Documentation and Support

Wiki: a collaborative website that allows for community contributions and editing, e.g., http://wiki.sugarlabs.org
IRC/chat (Internet Relay Chat): real-time text chat used by the development and technical support communities (and hopefully the learning community as well)
email list: a collection of email addresses—an efficient way to send email to a group of people who share an interest

Localization

Pootle: a server that is used to store and manage translation templates and files
POT file: the master translation template for a project
PO file: a file containing the instance of translated strings for a single language based upon a POT file