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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 [http://walterbender.org/ walterbender.org].) If you would like to contribute, please send email to [[User:walter|walter]] at sugarlabs.org by the weekend. (Also visit <span class="plainlinks">[http://planet.sugarlabs.org planet.sugarlabs.org].</span>)

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 [http://walterbender.org/ walterbender.org].) If you would like to contribute, please send email to [[User:walter|walter]] at sugarlabs.org by the weekend. (Also visit <span class="plainlinks">[http://planet.sugarlabs.org planet.sugarlabs.org].</span>)

1. The Sucrose 0.84 release is now official! Simon Schampijer and Tomeu Vizoso have put together comprehensive release notes (See [[DevelopmentTeam/Release/Releases/Sucrose/0.84|0.84 Release Notes]]). The long list of new features is impressive. And Sean Daly is spreading the word, having launched a major media blitz, a first for Sugar Labs, that has already gotten Sugar 0.84 exposure on [http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/sugar-labs-nonprofit-announces-new/story.aspx?guid={EF4B8934-0046-465F-AD4D-E82FBCE8F1EC}&dist=msr_7 Market Watch], [http://www.reuters.com/article/pressRelease/idUS100509+16-Mar-2009+PRN20090316 Reuters], and [http://www.forbes.com/feeds/prnewswire/2009/03/16/prnewswire200903160805PR_NEWS_USPR_____PH83812.html Forbes]. More to come.

===Sugar Digest ===

2. In preparation for the media campaign, there has been a lot of work done behind the scenes to make the wiki more easily searchable and navigable. Fred Grose has been the driving force behind a wiki reorganization, which includes a subpage menu for each of the major sections. Plus, we have made progress in eliminating much of the CamelCase in the wiki that was interfering with search.

I have been buried in meetings over the past few days, so I am a bit late in giving an update to the Sugar community.  

3. Aleksey Lim is making sure that all of our efforts are being put to good use. His ost recent magic is a revamped Sugar for Caixa Mágica, the distribution used by Project Magellan (Magalhães) and numerous other projects. Meanwhile, Sasche Silbe is working on getting sugar-jhbuild to work on Ubuntu Jaunty and Debian Squeeze.

First, I want to wish Rafael Enrique Ortiz Guerrero (dirakx) a rapid recovery.  

=== Community jams, meet-ups, and meetings ===

While I have been distracted, lots of great work has been happening: the Sugar on a Stick team is making great progress on the Fedora-11 port; the OLPC Learning Club held a pivotal meeting where they reached consensus about forming a Sugar Labs DC; progress is also being made in regard to a Sugar Lab in Peru; the Release Team has been cleaning a few outstanding bugs in 0.84.1; the community has been busy helping potential Google Summer of Code applicants refine their proposals; Sascha Silbe has been setting up a build farm for Sugar Labs; the Marketing Team has been reaching out to hundreds of more journalists about our new release; the Localization Team has been migrate the Pootle infrastucture to a new server; the Wiki Team has done a reorganization of the wiki in concert with the move away from CamelCase; and Sugar and Sugar Activities continue to be improved. A busy week.

4. [http://olpclearningclub.org The OLPC Learning Club – DC] is hosting a Family XO Mesh Meetup on Saturday, 21 March 2009.

The big news is that thanks to the efforts of Jameson Quinn and Mel Chua, we have been accepted into Google Summer of Code 2009. We need to solicit and encourage as many great project proposals as we can in the next few days (applications are due April 3): the more students who apply to our program, the better our chances of getting more slots assigned. Please direct potential applicants to

http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Summer_of_Code/Student_application_template  and

http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/DevelopmentTeam/ProjectIdeas

5. Jameson Quinn and Mel Chua have submitted our Google Summer of Code (GSoC) application. We have [[Summer_of_Code/Mentors|10 mentors]] and a growing [[DevelopmentTeam/ProjectIdeas|list of project ideas]]. While the number of interns who will be formally participating in GSoC will be relatively small, the mentoring framework being put into place will have impact above and beyond that one program. For example, Jeff Elkner sent out an email asking for mentoring support for some student projects; he got an overwhelming response from the community. Mentoring is a key to our growth.

Tomeu Vizoso beat me to the punch by blogged about the great contributions being made by community members (See http://blog.tomeuvizoso.net/2009/03/what-keeps-me-going-on.html). One crude measure of the growing ranks of contributors is the steadily increasing number of people on #sugar on irc.freenode.net. We have been hovering around 100 lately. It is great to see both the continuity of long-standing contributors and the newcomers. The extent to which the veterans are being supportive of the newcomers (and my own barage of naive questions) is a nice reflection on the project as a whole.

=== Tech Talk ===

===Tech Talk ===

6. Sebastian Dziallas has also been working some magic. He has created a snapshot of the Sugar-on-a-Stick image (SoaS-2) as a virtual machine. (Note that SoaS-2 is the Fedora 11 version of Sugar on a Stick.)

We had in impromtu meeting on IRC to discuss the outstanding issues in regard to future Fedora/Sugar support for the OLPC XO-1. The list of work items is shorter than I would have thought and many of these items already have teams of people working on them. We discussed as a reasonable target being able to these items in time for Fedora 12.

# Rainbow (activity security)

# special keys on the keyboard (brightness, audio, ..)

:In [http://download.sugarlabs.org/soas/appliances/soas2-20090315.tar.gz this tar.gz archive] you'll find a .vmdk and a .xml file. The .vmdk file is nothing more than the disk image for VMware. You should be able to import it easily, also in other applications supporting this file type, such as VirtualBox (in which I tested it).

Tony Forster continues to work magic with Turtle Art (See http://tonyforster.blogspot.com/2009/03/turtle-fileview.html).

:Please be aware that this image is still pre-alpha! It has quite a few bugs and is certainly not as stable as the SoaS-2 .iso images.

There is a new Sugar tutorial project (Please see http://tutorius.org/blog/the-first-iteration/).

Sebastian has created this image by hand, but will start building them at the same time as the .iso files.

Martin Langhoff announced the availability of XS-0.5.2 this week.

"It fixes 3 bugs, the most notable one being the ejabberd @online@ roster issue."

=== Sugar Labs ===

Sebastian Dziallas has made a new Sugar on a Stick snapshot available at

7. Gary Martin has generated a SOM from the past week of discussion on the IAEP mailing list (Please see [[:Image:2009-March-7-13-som.jpg|SOM]]).

 

 

 

Please test them.

 

 

Gary Martin has generated a SOM from the past week of discussion on the IAEP mailing list (Please see [[:Image:2009-March-14-20-som.jpg|SOM]]).

=== Community News archive ===

=== Community News archive ===