Sugar Labs

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Sugar Labs/Current Events (view source)

Revision as of 07:31, 24 June 2008

2,343 bytes added ,  07:31, 24 June 2008
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=== Sugar Digest ===
 
=== Sugar Digest ===
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1. Milan meeting: There will be a Sugar Labs meeting in Milan on Monday, 30 June. Please contact Walter Bender if you are interested in participating. (Walter also will be at the University of Tampere the weekend of the 28th—he is happy to meet with anyone interested in discussing Sugar before or after sauna.)
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1. Latest Sucrose: The new Sucrose 0.81.3 Development Release is now available. The release has some new features, including: Manual reordering of the Home view icons; a freeform layout of the Home view icons; improved feedback on activity startup; support for custom certificates in Browse; alt+tab activity switching; etc. We are now in feature freeze, so the short-term focus will be on testing, bug triaging and fixes. The community has done a great job in that we achieved practically all the features that we had targeted. Thanks to everyone that made this possible and special kudos to the Sugar release team.
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=== Community jams and meetups ===
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Detailed release notes can be found in the wiki (Please see [[ReleaseTeam/Releases/Sucrose/0.81.3]]); a sugar-jhbuild branch for the release can be found here (http://dev.laptop.org/git?p=sugar-jhbuild;a=shortlog;h=sucrose-0.81.3).
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With the release of 0.81.3 we will be in feature freeze ([[ReleaseTeam#Feature_freeze]]): this affects all of the modules included in the release. To request an exception, which will be exceptional, please send mail to sugar at laptop.org, copying release-team at sugarlabs.org; please include the patches you would like to land. For string changes please also copy localization at lists.laptop.org.
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2. Making the installation of Activities easier: Dave Farning is working on a web interface to managing activities based upon Mozilla's AMO codebase (addons.mozilla.org). He has successfully used AMO on a local server to install activities on an XO-1 laptop and to install Sugar on a conventional laptop. He has started submitting a series of patches upstream to Mozilla.org with the goal that SugarLabs will be able to use the AMO codebase as maintained by Moxilla. A few areas that require work: (a) Look and feel – applying the sugarlabs stylesheets; (b) Applications – currently, AMO hardcodes application data rather than handled dynamically; (c)  Addontypes – AMO can handle several addontypes such as extension, plugins, and and dictionaries, but they are not yet handled dynamically. By modularizing how AMO handles applications and add-on types, we should be able to drop in Sugar application  and and addontype code.
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The work flow for a developer would be:
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* Activity authors register their activity with AMO;
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* author uploads latest release into sandbox;
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* reviewer verifies new upload works correctly and publishes the upload.
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From the user perspective, Activities would then be browseable and downloadable in a manner similar to any Firefox plugin, with very fast, secure, and scalable updates.
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2. FOSSED: Kevin Cole is helping to promote the Free & Open Source Software in Education (FOSSED) conference to be held at the Governor's Academy in Byfield, Massachusetts, August 4th through 6th (For details, see http://fossed.blogspot.com/). The conference is (mainly) aimed at introducing teachers to FOSS.
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Dave is looking for help (the code is being put in https://www.develer.com/gitweb/pub?p=users/dfarning/w.s.o.git;a=summary).
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===Tech Talk===
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In parallel, there has also been a discussion on the Sugar list regarding development of an activity for updating Sugar and Sugar Activities.
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3. Home page: Tomeu Vizoso has been working on the layout for the Home page. This week, he:
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3. courses.sugarlabs.org: David Van Assche is setting up a Moodle installation at http://courses.sugarlabs.org to complement activities.sugarlabs.org.  It will house stable versions of activities, together with lesson plans, relevant reading materials, and related activities. The OLE Nepal team, with help from Bernie Innocenti, who is in Kathmandu for the summer, will be fleshing out the site. Please contribute.
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* Made "favorite icons" draggable;
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* Stored the position of favorite icons;
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* Made the layouts in the favorites view pluggable; and
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* Implemented a random layout option.
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4. Browse: The Sugar team released a new version of the Browse activity this week ([http://dev.laptop.org/~erikos/bundles/Web-90.xo Web-90.xo]). It has many interesting features; please try it and give us feedback.
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4. Usability testing: Carlos Mauro Cárdenas Fernández has begun a pilot usability test of Sugar on the Intel Classmate PC (Please see http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Projects/TestUsabilityOLPC for some details of his plans and initial findings).
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5. activities.sugarlabs.org: David Farning is working on converting https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/ to work with Sugar and its ecosystem of activities.
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=== Community jams and meetups ===
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6. Certificates: Marco Pesenti Gritti has made some progress on support for custom certificates in the Browse activity.
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5. Porto Alegre, Brazil: Juliano Bittencourt from Laboratório de Estudos Cognitivos reports that a GameJam was held at FISL 9.0, the largest Latin America free software conference. A short video made during the event is available on YouTube (Please see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oWKBdeZUtq0). A team from the Argentian PyGame group was the winner: a game called Falabranaman.
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7. Documentation: There are a number of complementary efforts for documenting the Sugar API and the process for creating sugar activities: (1) a high-level functional design of Sugar (See http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Human_interface_guidelines); (2) a set of "how to's"; (3) a set of APIs generated from the actual code (extracted through pydocs); and (4) some basic startup guides.
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===Tech Talk===
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David Farning has spent the week cleaning up the Sugar application programming interface (API) reference documentation at api.sugarlabs.org. Code for the site is at [https://www.develer.com/gitweb/pub?p=users/dfarning/api.git;a=summary api.git] and a rough draft of an API tutorial can be found in the wiki ([[DevelopmentTeam/Tutorials/API_Documentation]]). David is soliciting modules from developers to add to the build_api.sh script, which he plans to run daily.
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6. Infrastructure: Marco Pesenti Gritti has started a page on the wiki about infrastructure ([[Infrastucture_Plan]]) and is seeking your feedback.
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Faisal Anwar is writing a Sugar almanac to help new Sugar/Python developers. He is soliciting code samples and feedback. This week, he updated the section on how the basic activity creation tasks (Please see [http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Sugar.activity.activity Sugar.activity.activity]). In addition, he has written up some examples of basic datastore access. Additional documentation can be found at [http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Sugar-api-doc Sugar-api-doc].
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7. Journal: Tomeu Vizoso reports that a new version of the Journal activity has been released, with many translation updates and some visual fixes (Download it from http://dev.laptop.org/pub/sugar/sources/journal-activity/journal-activity-92.tar.bz2). New features include:
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* Add indications for empty Journal and empty search results (Eben Eliason)
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* Translation update for Italian (Carlo Falciola)
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* Fix appearance of "no preview" (Eben Eliason)
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* Translation update for Khmer (Rit Lim)
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* Translation update for Haitian Creole (Diksyone Ayisyen)
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* Translation update for German (Markus Schlager)
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* Translation update for Marathi (Rupali Sarode)
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* Translation update for French (Samy Boutayeb)
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* Adapt object chooser to new designs. Some refactoring was needed (Tomeu)
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* Adapt UI to right-to-left scripts (Khaled Hosny)
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Christoph Derndorfer and the team at OLPC Austria have been working on a handbook for activity developers ([http://www.olpcaustria.org/mediawiki/index.php/Activity_handbook Activity Handbook]).
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8. Datastore: Tomeu also reports that a new version of the datastore has been released (http://dev.laptop.org/pub/sugar/sources/sugar-datastore/sugar-datastore-0.8.2.tar.bz2). New features include a metadata copy outside the index.
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Meanwhile, Walter Bender is pulling together a new Getting Started Guide based upon the one he wrote for OLPC, but that is reflective of a variety of platforms and considers some of the new features in the Joyride builds.
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9. USB key boot: The CD-image of the recent XO-LiveCD (Version 080607) contains a script to copy the data on a USB key and make it bootable:
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*  mount the CD (or ISO-image) on a computer running Linux;
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*  open a console (shell) and go into the directory tools/;
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*  insert a usb memory device and
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*  run the command ./make_usbstick.sh -d <block-device> -m <cd-mount-point>
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Hint: ./make_usbstick.sh -h provides more detailed documentation. Please contact Wolfgang Rohrmoser if you have any questions (WolfgangRohrmoser at web.de).
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8. Read: James Simmons is working on text to speech with "Karaoke" highlighting be a built in part of the Sugar environment (Please see http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Read_Etexts and download it from [http://wiki.laptop.org/images/4/44/ReadEtexts-5.xo ReadEtexts-5.xo]).  
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10. Char 41: Morgan Collett has released Chat 41 (Please see http://dev.laptop.org/pub/sugar/sources/chat-activity/Chat-41.tar.bz2 and http://dev.laptop.org/~morgan/bundles/Chat-41.xo). New features include:
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* Updated translations: mr, de, ht, km, es, it;
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* #6036: Add separator after old chat history;
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* #6298: Implement 1-1 private chat with non Sugar Jabber clients.
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Morgan also updated the Presence Service with the changes required for non-Sugar Jabber clients to chat with OLPC XO-1 laptops.
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9. SocialCalc: Luke Closs is seeking feedback about the Socialcalc-xocom integration work he has done (Please see http://github.com/lukec/socialcalc-xocom/tree/master and download it from [http://github.com/lukec/socialcalc-xocom/tree/master%2FSocialCalcActivity-1.xo?raw=true SocialCalcActivity-1.xo]).
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11. Fedora 9: Daniel Drake reports that the following packages may make the Fedora-9 build experience a little more bearable:
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* a NetworkManager that can actually connect to networks (http://dev.laptop.org/~dsd/NetworkManager-0.6.5-0.11.svn3246.olpc3.i386.rpm);
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* fixed keyboard – arrow keys, Alt-Gr and other functionality (http://dev.laptop.org/~dsd/xorg-x11-server-Xorg-1.4.99.901-29.20080415.fc9.i386.rpm)
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10. Meta tools: David Van Assche and Martin Langhoff have been discussing various approaches to school administration tools on the Server Development list. Moodle, which will be bundled with the school server by default is compatible with a number of different tools, notably openadmin (http://richtech.ca/openadmin/). David recommends considering using ClaSS (http://www.laex.org/class) as it is "more targeted to just the administration of the school, attendance, grading, reporting and general student management." Please share your experiences with these tools.
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12. Alt-Tab: Benjamin Berg submitted a number of patches to update Alt-Tab behavior for switching between activities.
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11. Koji: Marco Pesenti Gritti, Dennis Gilmore, and Michael Stone have been discussing how to arrange our Koji tags for the 8.2.0 release. Assuming no serious objections, Michael will freeze the dist-olpc3 tag in the OLPC-3 CVS branch and create dist-olpc3-{devel,testing,updates} and dist-olpc4 tags. (OLPC-3 represents OLPC's third buildroot. Buildroots contain the  compilers and basic system libraries necessary to build other packages. It may be helpful to create a dist-olpc3-devel-sugar to separate unrelated streams of development.)
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13. Measure activity: Arjun Sarwal has been working upon 'Sound' and 'Sensor' contexts within Measure and also, adding a textbox at the bottom that mentions details about the signal/sound input (Please view a screenshot at http://crank.laptop.org/~arjs/sound_sensors.png). Arjun has also been working on a new re-organized wiki page for Measure (Please see http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Measure/New_temp). Suggestions and contributions are very welcome.
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* dist-olpc3-devel - the site of ongoing development (by default, your packages will be built into this tag);
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14. Home view: Tomeu Visozo has implemented a Home view user interface that allows the user to "drag and drop" activities to desired locations on the screen (freeform) rather than restricting them to the circle. Other activities move nicely out of the way if you try to drop one on top of another.
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* dist-olpc3-testing - things that are ready for QA testing;
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* dist-olpc3-updates - things that pass QA;
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* dist-olpc4 - Fedora Rawhide tracker and buildroot experimentation (OLPC-specific changes needed to make Rawhide-based builds).
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12. Feature freeze: An update on the status of the ongoing features can be found in the wiki ([[ReleaseTeam/Roadmap#New_features]]).
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15. Patches: Marco Pesenti Gritti reviewed patches and more patches. He also packaged xulrunner 1.9 final and adapted the Browse activity to it. Finally he coordinated the Sugar 0.81.3 release and made big progresses on a Fedora 9 based Sugar liveCD. (Note that xulrunner 1.9 final is the version used in Firefox 3, which provides much better memory use than previous versions.)
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13. Test plans: Michael Stone and the OLPC QA team are requesting that each release we get in the stable build is associated with a set of tests that they will perform to verify that things works as expected. It is proposed that it be mandatory to have a Trac item associated with each "news" in the git changelog and each Trac item would have a corresponding testcase.
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16. Sugar Almanac: Faisal Anwar of Media Modifications has made progress on an online "Sugar Almanac" of best practices and working code snippets (Please see http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Sugar.activity.activity).
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In parallel, we'd like to start more formal user-testing in the field of some of the proposed Sugar feature changes. Walter had been in discussion with the deployment teams in Uruguay, Paraguay, and Peru about designating test environments. We'll likely use the new Frame behavior as a test case for testing.
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17. Etoys: Bert Freudenberg reports a new etoys release (Please see http://dev.laptop.org/pub/sugar/sources/etoys/etoys-3.0.2029.tar.gz and http://dev.laptop.org/pub/sugar/sources/etoys-activity/etoys-activity-83.tar.gz ; the bundled versions cab be found at http://etoys.laptop.org/rpms/etoys-3.0.2007-1.noarch.rpm and http://etoys.laptop.org/rpms/Etoys-83.xo). Improvements include: Pango fixes (tested with Nepalese), new DBus bindings, updated QuickGuides, a few more strings made translatable.
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14. Developers Meeting: Simon Schampijer reports that a summary of this week's developers meeting can be found here in the wiki ([[DevelopmentTeam/Meetings#Thursday_June_12_2008_-_17.00_.28UTC.29|12 June notes]]). Simon will be on a well-deserved holiday for the next two weeks; Tomeu will be hosting the weekly meeting on irc.
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18. Statistics: ohloh also has some statistics on the Sugar software:
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* http://www.ohloh.net/projects/9605/analyses/latest
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* http://www.ohloh.net/projects/11601/analyses/latest
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* http://www.ohloh.net/projects/sugar-presence-service/analyses/latest
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* http://www.ohloh.net/projects/11526/analyses/latest
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* http://www.ohloh.net/projects/11636/analyses/latest
    
=== Sugar Labs ===
 
=== Sugar Labs ===
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15. Wiki translations: Chris Leonard has added GoogleTrans templates to many of the pages in wiki.sugarlabs.org; while machine translation is not yet as good as human translation, it gives a reasonable facsimile, hence making the wiki more immediately accessible to a broader audience.
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19. 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-June-14-20-som.jpg]]). The list was relatively quite this week, considering all of the progress, so the map is not very informative – the data being sparse.
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16. 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-June-07-13-som.jpg]]). The discussion seems to have been focused on features ("needs") and documentation.
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-walter
    
==Sugar in the news==
 
==Sugar in the news==
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