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Archive/Current Events/2008-06-16 (view source)

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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
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It has been a busy week for Sugar Labs.
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Monday, 30 June. Please contact Walter Bender if you are interested in
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participating. (Walter also will be at the University of Tampere the
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weekend of the 28th—he is happy to meet with anyone interested in
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discussing Sugar before or after sauna.)
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=== Community jams and meetups ===
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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/).
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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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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.
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A draft proposal for a governance model for Sugar Labs has been posted to the wiki (Please see http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/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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2. FOSSED: Kevin Cole is helping to promote the Free & Open Source
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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 http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Press#Sugar_in_the_news).
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Software in Education (FOSSED) conference to be held at the Governor's
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Academy in Byfield, Massachusetts, August 4th through 6th (For
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details, see http://fossed.blogspot.com/). The conference is (mainly)
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aimed at introducing teachers to FOSS.
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===Tech Talk===
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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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3. Home page: Tomeu Vizoso has been working on the layout for the Home
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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 (http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_help).
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page. This week, he:
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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
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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 http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/EducationTeam).
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activity this week (http://dev.laptop.org/~erikos/bundles/Web-90.xo).
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It has many interesting features; please try it and give us feedback.
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5. activities.sugarlabs.org: David Farning is working on converting
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https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/ to work with Sugar and its
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ecosystem of activities.
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6. Certificates: Marco Pesenti Gritti has made some progress on
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=== Community jams and meetups ===
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support for custom certificates in the Browse activity.
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7. Documentation: There are a number of complementary efforts for
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documenting the Sugar API and the process for creating sugar
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activities: (1) a high-level functional design of Sugar (See
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http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Human_interface_guidelines); (2) a set of
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"how to's"; (3) a set of APIs generated from the actual code
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(extracted through pydocs); and (4) some basic startup guides.
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David Farning has spent the week cleaning up the Sugar application
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===Tech Talk===
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programming interface (API) reference documentation at
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api.sugarlabs.org. Code for the site is at
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https://www.develer.com/gitweb/pub?p=users/dfarning/api.git;a=summary
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and a rough draft of an API tutorial can be found in the wiki
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(http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/DevelopmentTeam/Tutorials/API_Documentation).
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David is soliciting modules from developers to add to the build_api.sh
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script, which he plans to run daily.
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Faisal Anwar is writing a Sugar almanac to help new Sugar/Python
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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 http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/DevelopmentTeam/Meetings). You are invited to join; please add topics that you'd like to discuss (Instructions are in the wiki at http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/DevelopmentTeam/Meetings#How_to_add_topics).
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developers. He is soliciting code samples and feedback. This week, he
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updated the section on how the basic activity creation tasks (Please
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see http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Sugar.activity.activity). In addition,
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he has written up some examples of basic datastore access. Additional
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documentation can be found at http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Sugar-api-doc.
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Christoph Derndorfer and the team at OLPC Austria have been working on
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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 handbook for activity developers
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(http://www.olpcaustria.org/mediawiki/index.php/Activity_handbook).
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Meanwhile, Walter Bender is pulling together a new Getting Started
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8. Autodocumentation: 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.
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Guide based upon the one he wrote for OLPC, but that is reflective of
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a variety of platforms and considers some of the new features in the
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Joyride builds.
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8. Read: James Simmons is working on text to speech with "Karaoke"
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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 and the bundle from http://dev.laptop.org/~erikos/bundles/other/Log-9.xo). The new log-activity enables users be able to read the Sugar logs on non-XO platforms.
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highlighting be a built in part of the Sugar environment (Please see
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http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Read_Etexts and download it from
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http://wiki.laptop.org/images/4/44/ReadEtexts-5.xo).
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9. SocialCalc: Luke Closs is seeking feedback about the
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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 and http://dev.laptop.org/pub/sugar/sources/etoys-activity/etoys-activity-82.tar.gz or the ready-to-use bundles http://etoys.laptop.org/rpms/etoys-3.0.2007-1.noarch.rpm and http://etoys.laptop.org/rpms/Etoys-82.xo). Look forward to more translatable phrases and a minor tile fixes.
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Socialcalc-xocom integration work he has done (Please see
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http://github.com/lukec/socialcalc-xocom/tree/master and download it
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from  http://github.com/lukec/socialcalc-xocom/tree/master%2FSocialCalcActivity-1.xo?raw=true).
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10. Meta tools: David Van Assche and Martin Langhoff have been
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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 and the bundle from http://dev.laptop.org/~erikos/bundles/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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discussing various approaches to school administration tools on the
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Server Development list. Moodle, which will be bundled with the school
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server by default is compatible with a number of different tools,
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notably openadmin (http://richtech.ca/openadmin/). David recommends
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considering using ClaSS (http://www.laex.org/class) as it is "more
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targeted to just the administration of the school, attendance,
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grading, reporting and general student management." Please share your
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experiences with these tools.
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11. Koji: Marco Pesenti Gritti, Dennis Gilmore, and Michael Stone have
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10. Feature freeze: The feature (and strings) freeze (20 June) is approaching very quickly (Please see http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/ReleaseTeam/Roadmap#New_features).
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been discussing how to arrange our Koji tags for the 8.2.0 release.
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Assuming no serious objections, Michael will freeze the dist-olpc3 tag
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in the OLPC-3 CVS branch and create dist-olpc3-{devel,testing,updates}
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and dist-olpc4 tags. (OLPC-3 represents OLPC's third buildroot.
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Buildroots contain the compilers and basic system libraries necessary
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to build other packages. It may be helpful to create a
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dist-olpc3-devel-sugar to separate unrelated streams of development.)
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* dist-olpc3-devel - the site of ongoing development (by default, your
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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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packages will be built into this tag);
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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
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(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
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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.
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can be found in the wiki
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(http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/ReleaseTeam/Roadmap#New_features).
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13. Test plans: Michael Stone and the OLPC QA team are requesting that
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This Live-CD project targets the main goals:
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each release we get in the stable build is associated with a set of
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* Give children, students, teachers and parents the opportunity to participate and use the educational software on a generic PC;
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tests that they will perform to verify that things works as expected.
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* 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
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It is proposed that it be mandatory to have a Trac item associated
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* 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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with each "news" in the git changelog and each Trac item would have a
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corresponding testcase.
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In parallel, we'd like to start more formal user-testing in the field
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The main features and changes since version 080321 include:
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of some of the proposed Sugar feature changes. Walter had been in
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* 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;
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discussion with the deployment teams in Uruguay, Paraguay, and Peru
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* Improved CD customization; additional activities and RPM packages can be installed by putting them into CD top-level directories;
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about designating test environments. We'll likely use the new Frame
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* A new script to prepare USB boot devices out of the Live-ISO image;
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behavior as a test case for testing.
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* Tested on a wide range of PC and laptop hardware and proved to work with all common virtual machines on Windows, MacOS and Linux;
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* Additional Xorg graphic drivers and improved X11 auto-configuration tools;
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* Bug fixes, updates and new activities; and
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* Linux kernel 2.6.24.7, using the aufs-filesystem.
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14. Developers Meeting: Simon Schampijer reports that a summary of
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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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this week's developers meeting can be found here in the wiki
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(http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/DevelopmentTeam/Meetings#Thursday_June_12_2008_-_17.00_.28UTC.29).
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Simon will be on a well-deserved holiday for the next two weeks; Tomeu
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will be hosting the weekly meeting on irc.
      
=== Sugar Labs ===
 
=== Sugar Labs ===
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15. Wiki translations: Chris Leonard has added GoogleTrans templates
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13. SOM: Gary Martin has generated another SOM from the past week of discussion on the IAEP mailing list (Please see       http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/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.
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to many of the pages in wiki.sugarlabs.org; while machine translation
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is not yet as good as human translation, it gives a reasonable
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facsimile, hence making the wiki more immediately accessible to a
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broader audience.
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16. Self-organizing map (SOM): Gary Martin has generated another SOM
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from the past week of discussion on the IAEP mailing list (Please see
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http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Image:2008-June-07-13-som.jpg). The
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discussion seems to have been focused on features ("needs") and
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documentation.
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[[Category:Sugar Digest]]
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[[Category:Sugar digest]]
Retrieved from "https://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Special:MobileDiff/8633"