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| | An archive of the Sugar Digest is available [[Press/Archive|here]]. | | An archive of the Sugar Digest is available [[Press/Archive|here]]. |
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| − | === Sugar Digest (2008-06-02) === | + | === Sugar Digest === |
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| − | 1. Software Freedom Conservancy: Sugar Labs is entering discussions with the Software Freedom Conservancy (Please see [http://conservancy.softwarefreedom.org/overview/]). If we are accepted into the Conservancy, we'd join projects such as Inkscape, Samba, and Wine. The Conservancy provides member projects with free financial and administrative services, but does not involve itself with technological and artistic decisions.
| + | It has been a busy week for Sugar Labs. |
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| − | 2. Governance: We will be gathering in Milan at the end of the month of June to discuss, among other things, possible models of governance for Sugar Labs. More details will follow soon.
| + | 1. Sucrose: On behalf of the Release Team, Simon Schampijer announced Sucrose 0.81.2 (Development Release). Features of this new release include elimination of some platform dependencies, an improved activity-list view, a graphical user interface to the Sugar control panel (including settings for Frame activation delays), and expanded internationalization of Etoys. The next development release is scheduled in two weeks. Thanks to everyone who made this release possible! (Please refer to http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/ReleaseTeam/Releases/Sucrose/0.81.2 for detailed release notes.) XO users can test the release by updating to joyride-2024 (Please see [http://xs-dev.laptop.org/~cscott/olpc/streams/joyride/build2024/ build2024]). |
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| − | 3. Linux Foundation: Walter Bender and Jim Zemlin (Executive Director of the Linux Foundation) met to discuss ways in which we could work together. The Linux Foundation "hosts collaboration events among the Linux technical community, application developers, industry, and end users", manages a "Technical Fellowships Fund" to ensure key projects get accomplished, and helps promote Linux regionally. Obviously lots of synergy with the Sugar Labs mission!
| + | 2. Governance: One of the challenges that free and open-source projects face is the impact of governance on their community members: while FOSS licenses assure access to source code, that doesn't guarantee a successful project. A governance model can help ensure that the project is run in a professional, disciplined, and equitable manner. Good governance lets the community engage in discourse and provides a transparent mechanism for arbitration in the hopefully rare circumstances in which it is necessary. |
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| − | 4. UMPC abundance: The success of the OLPC XO and the ASUS Eee PC seems to have attracted the attention of the industry: it has been a busy week in the world of ultra-mobile PCs. Dell (See [http://www.engadget.com/2008/05/29/dells-mini-inspiron-eee-pc-killer-revealed/]), Acer (See [http://www.engadget.com/2008/05/29/first-pics-of-acers-aspire-one-eee-pc-twin/]), Wizbook ([http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquirer/news/2008/05/28/noon-eee-pc-wizbook-hits]), Elonix (See [http://www.desktoplinux.com/news/NS8294433279.html]), and Kanguru (See [http://pc.kanguru.pt/Home/]) were all making headlines. Each of these machines represents yet another potential platform for running Sugar.
| + | Some attributes that are necessary for good governance include: meritocracy, transparency of process, open access to anyone who has demonstrated the skills to contribute, and a means to ensure a balance of control so that no one special interest wrests control of either the discourse or the decision-making. |
| | | | |
| − | === Community jams and meetups ===
| + | A draft proposal for a governance model for Sugar Labs has been posted to the wiki (Please see [[SugarLabs:Governance]]). Community input and feedback is important: please help us get this done properly. Feel free to make corrections and comments in the wiki or on the IAEP list. |
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| − | 5. PyOhio: Catherine Devlin is helping to organize a regional miniconference on Python programming Saturday, July 26, in Columbus, Ohio (Please see [http://pyohio.org]). Ralph Hyre, a Sugar community organizer in Cincinnati, suggested that someone might be willing to present on Sugar (and OLPC project). It is just past the date for their "call for proposals", but they may be willing to accept a late submission. (Please email Mat Kovach <matkovach at gmail.com> or call at 216-798-3397.)
| + | 3. It's an education project: This week has also seen a discussion of the educational mission of Sugar Labs in the main-stream media and blog-sphere—a refreshing change of pace from the focus on hardware. You can keep tabs on some of the threads by visiting the Press section of the wiki (Please see [[Press#Sugar in the news]]). |
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| | + | 4. Help Wanted: Sugar Labs was created to provide a mechanism for supporting the Sugar community of volunteers. These volunteers are engaged in a variety of activities: some are writing software to improve Sugar; some are porting Sugar to new platforms; some are developing new activities that run in Sugar; some are helping to debug Sugar and help with quality assurance; some are writing documentation for Sugar developers and for those who use Sugar in the field; some are developing new scenarios for learning with Sugar; some are using Sugar and reporting upon their experiences to the community; and some are providing help and support. |
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| − | ===Tech Talk===
| + | Since we started Sugar Labs, we have been receiving a number of requests for help: porting Sugar to new distributions; tuning Sugar on a specific hardware platform; developing specific Sugar activity; helping with support in specific deployments, etc. In order to expedite these requests, a new section in the wiki ([[Sugar help]]). |
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| − | 6. Sugar tip of the week: How to install activities. There a several ways to manually install new activities in Sugar:
| + | 5. Wiki: David Farning continues to make great progress in organizing and fleshing out the Sugar Labs wiki. He has moved a great deal of the Sugar documentation over from wiki.laptop.org and is in the process of finishing up the translation menus and importing of some missing images. In support of the Developer Team, he is setting up an automated API documentation generator set up as well as jhbuild. He is seeking some help from the learning community to set up the Education Team pages (Please see the stub at [[EducationTeam]]). |
| − | (A) You can use xo-get from the Terminal activity (See [http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Xo-get] for the details). Find activities by typing:
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| − | ./xo-get.py list
| + | === Community jams and meetups === |
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| − | Install activities by typing:
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| − | ./xo-get.py install <activity-name>
| + | ===Tech Talk=== |
| − | | |
| − | e.g.,
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| − | | |
| − | ./xo-get.py install simcity
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| − | | |
| − | or
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| − | | |
| − | ./xo-get.py install /media/<USB stick name>/simcity.xo
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| − | | |
| − | (B) You can also install pre-bundled activities from the Terminal activity or, if you have an XO laptop, from a customization key (See [http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Customization_key]):
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| − | ./sugar-install-bundle /media/<USB stick name>/<Activity name.xo> | + | 6. Developer meetings: Weekly sugar developers meetings were restarted this past week; meetings are Thursdays at 17:00 (UTC) on irc.freenode.net, on the #sugar-meeting channel (Please see [[DevelopmentTeam/Meetings]]). You are invited to join; please add topics that you'd like to discuss (Instructions are in the wiki at [[DevelopmentTeam/Meetings#How_to_add_topics]]). |
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| − | (C) You can install activities from the browser, either over the internet or from USB (See http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Browse#Install_an_activity for details):
| + | 7. Review process: Simon Schampijer has written up notes about the code-review process (Please see http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/DevelopmentTeam/CodeReview). |
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| − | a. open the Browse Activity
| + | 8. Auto-documentation: As mentioned above, David Faring has put together an alpha version of an automated API documentation system (Please see [http://www.sugarlabs.org/~dfarning/]). The APIs are generated using epydoc, which only documents Python files; any C code (or other languages) are not documented. |
| − | b. point it to an activity bundle, e.g., http://web.media.mit.edu/~jmaloney/scratch-xo/Scratch-5.xo or file:///media/<USB stick name>/Scratch-5.xo
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| − | c. When the download is complete, a journal entry will have been created. "Resume" the activity from the journal. Hence forth, it will appear in the list of installed activities.
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| − | 7. SocialCalc: Dan Bricklin has been hard at work on the base SocialCalc code. In the next few weeks he hopes to have a new build for available. It will include a new tab with "Settings" that shows all of the attributes of the current cell and sheet; it provides access to all of the formatting options, including custom formats and colors, padding, fonts, etc. Also, it should be better suited for localization in that it will have a single Constants file with pretty much all of the customizable values for the spreadsheet engine (but not the UI above the sheet yet). At the point of this new release, Dan thinks we should have something very useful for people to try.
| + | 9. Activities: Simon reports that a new version of the log-activity has been released (You can download the source from [http://dev.laptop.org/pub/sugar/sources/log-activity/Log-9.tar.bz2 Log-9.tar.bz2] and the bundle from [http://dev.laptop.org/~erikos/bundles/other/Log-9.xo Log-9.xo]). The new log-activity enables users be able to read the Sugar logs on non-XO platforms. |
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| − | 8. Metacity: Sayamindu Dasgupta has been experimenting with replacing Matchbox with a Metacity as the window manager that runs behind Sugar. Despite the fact that the Sugar UI is different from a standard desktop, it is almost completely implemented using standard window manager hints and properties, thus a move to a more compliant window manager will make it possible to run standard desktop applications directly within Sugar (Please follow the discussion at [[WindowManagement]]).
| + | Bert Freudenberg reports the release of a new version of Etoys (See [http://dev.laptop.org/pub/sugar/sources/etoys/etoys-3.0.2007.tar.gz etoys-3.0.2007.tar.gz] and [http://dev.laptop.org/pub/sugar/sources/etoys-activity/etoys-activity-82.tar.gz etoys-activity-82.tar.gz] or the ready-to-use bundles [http://etoys.laptop.org/rpms/etoys-3.0.2007-1.noarch.rpm etoys-3.0.2007-1.noarch.rpm] and [http://etoys.laptop.org/rpms/Etoys-82.xo Etoys-82.xo]). Look forward to more translatable phrases and a minor tile fixes. |
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| − | A RPM of Sayamindu's patch is available for download ([http://dev.laptop.org/~sayamindu/sugar_metacity/metacity-2.23.21-2.olpc2.i386.rpm]), however, he warns that you should *not* install this patch on your standard desktop machine yet. Things which have not been resolved yet include: (1) Some activities tend to go into full screen mode automatically; (2) Activity switching does not work yet; (3) Some palettes and windows are placed incorrectly; (4) The mouse cursor theme switches back to the normal (default??) one; and (5) Memory usage with compositing enabled is high.
| + | Tomeu Vizoso has made great progress on the Browse activity (You can download the source from [http://dev.laptop.org/pub/sugar/sources/web-activity/Web-89.tar.bz2 Web-89.tar.bz2] and the bundle from [http://dev.laptop.org/~erikos/bundles/Web-89.xo Web-89.xo]). Improvements include making the object chooser transient on the activity window; an Edit toolbar; a Follow link item in the link palette; a palette for images; and a simple palette for links with an option to copy to the clipboard. |
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| − | 9. Rainbow: Michael Stone released rainbow-0.7.13 with a fix for #6989, a problem that was interfering with the launching of the Browse activity.
| + | 10. Feature freeze: The feature (and strings) freeze (20 June) is approaching very quickly (Please see [[ReleaseTeam/Roadmap#New_features]]). |
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| − | 10. Automated testing: Michael has offered Xen hosting for Sugar Labs' automated testing efforts. (Xen is a FOSS standard for virtualization—please see [http://xen.org] for details.)
| + | 11. Games: Robert Krahn reports that more games (now available as activities that can easily be installed from the Browse activity) are available at http://www.swa.hpi.uni-potsdam.de/projects/olpc/ thanks to the efforts of the HPI Software Architecture Group at the University of Potsdam. |
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| − | 11. Wikipedia activity: Chris Ball has made the first release of the Wikipedia activity, which contains a
| + | 12. LiveCD: Wolfgang Rohrmoser reports that a new release (080607) of the Livebackup XO-LiveCD is available (Please see [http://dev.laptop.org/pub/livebackupcd/build-708+joyride-2024]). There is a mirror ([ftp://rohrmoser-engineering.de/pub/XO-LiveCD/]) in Germany. |
| − | 30,000 article offline snapshot of the Spanish Wikipedia with 3,000 images. The activity is based on code from Patrick Collison's "wikipedia-iphone" project; this version was mostly developed by community volunteers: thanks to Wade Brainerd (porting from the wikipedia-iphone code to a Python activity, fixing parser bugs), Ben Schwartz (image download and scaling, bug-fixing) and Madeleine Ball (algorithms for article and image selection). Please see [http://dev.laptop.org/~cjb/eswiki/] and [http://wiki.laptop.org/go/WikiBrowse] for the download and more details.
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| − | 12. Chat: Morgan Collett worked on private invites for Chat, although his final testing was blocked by a palette problem in Sugar. Morgan has also filed a patch for Ticket #5767 that uses black text on light fill colors to improve legibility.
| + | This Live-CD project targets the main goals: |
| | + | * Give children, students, teachers and parents the opportunity to participate and use the educational software on a generic PC; |
| | + | * Demonstration of OLPC/Sugar software to non-developers; you can also start the sugar desktop on Windows, Linux or MacOS using a Virtual Machine; and |
| | + | * For developers the CD provides an easy maintainable Live-System, which could be used to develop and test activities on the Sugar desktop. |
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| − | 13. Browse: Tomeu Visozo has added some more palette options to content in Browse, including copy, paste, undo, redo commands to the Browse toolbar. (Tomeu also fixed a problem with activity order in the activity list and shell.)
| + | The main features and changes since version 080321 include: |
| | + | * Dual boot option for update.1 and joyride builds; you can try out the new Sugar design by booting a recent (2024) OLPC joyride version; |
| | + | * Improved CD customization; additional activities and RPM packages can be installed by putting them into CD top-level directories; |
| | + | * A new script to prepare USB boot devices out of the Live-ISO image; |
| | + | * Tested on a wide range of PC and laptop hardware and proved to work with all common virtual machines on Windows, MacOS and Linux; |
| | + | * Additional Xorg graphic drivers and improved X11 auto-configuration tools; |
| | + | * Bug fixes, updates and new activities; and |
| | + | * Linux kernel 2.6.24.7, using the aufs-filesystem. |
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| − | 14. Icons: Scott Ananian has added a bit of functionality to his (still incomplete) icon-draw-activity; it is on the path to becoming a complete "convert SVGs into proper Sugar icons" tool. (Please see [http://dev.laptop.org/git?p=users/cscott/icon-draw-activity] for details.) Scott also filed bugs with improved icons for scratch (#7140), gcompris (#7138), paint (#7139), turtle art (#6836), and wikibrowse.
| + | Further information is available (Please see [ftp://rohrmoser-engineering.de/pub/XO-LiveCD/XO-LiveCD_080607.pdf] and join the discussion at [http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/livebackup-xo-cd]). |
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| | === Sugar Labs === | | === Sugar Labs === |
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| − | 15. LinuxTag: Simon Schampijer reports that Members of the Sugar community (Please see http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Image:LinuxTag-2008-Bernie-Reinier-Marco-Simon-Bert-Tomeu.jpg) met this weekend at the Linuxtag 2008 ([http://www.linuxtag.org/2008/]) in Berlin. Besides meeting people in person and the usual putting faces to names, they discussed the current situation of Sugar: hot topics Sugar on multiple platforms and the structure Sugar Labs.
| + | 13. SOM: Gary Martin has generated another SOM from the past week of discussion on the IAEP mailing list (Please see [[:Image:2008-May-31-June-06-som.jpg]]). From looking over the map, the discussion seems to have been focused on Sugar development: what is used, needed, made and to be made. |
| − | | |
| − | Thanks to OLPC Germany and especially to Holger Levsen, there was also an opportunity to give an introduction to Sugar to the winners of an Idea Contest ([http://wiki.olpc-deutschland.de/Start?action=AttachFile&do=view&target=LinuxTag-2008-OLPC-Deutschland-Developers.jpg]). Robert Krahn gave a tutorial about using Squeak on the XO and Wolfgang Rohrmoser handed out a
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| − | XO-Live CD ([ftp://rohrmoser-engineering.de/pub/XO-LiveCD/]) to people who were interested in trying out Sugar on their machines.
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| − | | |
| − | 16. SOM: Gary Martin has prepared this weeks SOM of the its.an.education.project list (Please see [[:Image:2008-May-24-30-som.jpg]]). Organization and governance seem to be hot topics (The list archive can be found at [http://lists.lo-res.org/pipermail/its.an.education.project/]).
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| − | | |
| − | 17. Wiki: David Farning has been very busy organizing the Sugar Labs wiki. His focus has been on building a framework to support teams within the community:
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| − | * AccessibiltyTeam - Responsible for accessibility issues within Sugar.
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| − | * BugSquad - Responsible for locating and fixing bugs.
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| − | * BuildTeam - Responsible for creating daily and release builds.
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| − | * DevelopmentTeam - Responsible for Developing the software modules within Sugar.
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| − | * DocumentationTeam - Responsible for writing both user and technical documentation.
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| − | * EducationTeam - Responsible for setting the Educational goals for the sugar Community.
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| − | * MarketingTeam - Responsible for marketing the Sugar brand and product.
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| − | * ReleaseTeam - Responsible for shipping the current release and planning for up coming releases.
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| − | * Sugar Labs - Responsible for governance and fund raising.
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| − | * TranslationTeam - Responsible for the translation needs of the community.
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| − | * UITeam - Responsible for the User interface.
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| − | * WikiTeam - Responsible for the Sugar Labs wiki.
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| − |
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| − | The community portal ([[Community]]) has a link to each teams' section within the wiki.
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| | ==Sugar in the news== | | ==Sugar in the news== |