Sugar Labs/Current Events

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What's new

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 walterbender.org.) If you would like to contribute, please send email to walter at sugarlabs.org by the weekend. (Also visit planet.sugarlabs.org.)

Sugar Digest

We are on the eve of the release of Sugar (Sucrose 0.84). This is the second major release since Sugar Labs was founded and the community has shown great discipline in keeping to the release schedule while simultaneously making great strides in usability and stability. The complexity of the release process has been compounded by the fact that we are targeting a much broader base than previously. Not only are we working with many more GNU/Linux distributions (easily twice as many as with 0.82), but the LiveCD/LiveUSB distributions are playing a major role in our outreach strategy—supporting this diversity requires much more coordination and more testing cycles. As the new release is pulled into the distributions we'll undoubtedly get feedback about bugs—we are still too thin on the testing (Bug) team, but nonetheless, we are on a trajectory towards a much improved product that will reach many more children in the coming months.

While much of work has been targeting low-level improvements, some user-facing Sugar (Glucose) highlights include "resume by default", which makes it much easier to access on-going projects and greatly reduces clutter in the Journal, and universal "view source", activated by "Shift-Alt-V". The community has also been busy enhancing Sugar Activities (Fructose). Old favorites have seen improvements and many new Activities have been added.

The Localization team has been busy. We have almost complete support for more than 25 languages and almost 70 active language teams.

The biggest changes in terms of infrastructure are the switch over to Gitorious for project hosting and the recent addition of addons.sugarlabs.org. Gitorious makes Sugar truly a distributed project. No one gates adding new projects or forking of existing projects. The intelligence is "in the leaves" and now the control is in the leaves as well. Visit addons.sugarlabs.org if you haven't done so already. It is modeled after the Mozilla addon site and it is much more accessible for the user (and efficient for the developer) than [wiki.laptop.org/go/Activities/All the cumbersome wiki interface] we had been using. Further, it is designed for scale.

We are also on the eve of launching a static website as a series of landing pages for sugarlabs.org. Christian Schmidt and the Design Team have worked tireless to built a site that will be much more accessible to teachers and parents, many of whom have found the wiki to be impenetrable. Sean Daley and the Marketing Team have been helping fill in the many holes in the site's content and also turning my academic-speak into something comprehensible. A highlight of the new site is a beautiful illustrated narrative by graphic artist, Dongyun Lee. During a heated feedback process some great ideas for a children-oriented site that more directly interfaces to Sugar were voiced. Something to aspire to in the coming months.

Kudos to Simon Schampijer and all the members of the Release Team., Sayamindu Dasgupta and the Localization Team, Bernie Innocenti and Dave Farning and the Infrastructure Team, Christian, Dongyun, Sean, and all the members of the Design and Marketing Teams, and all the Activity authors and the various teams at the upstream distributions who have been helping with packaging, debugging, and feedback.

Community jams, meet-ups, and meetings

  • I'll be hosting a meeting of the Oversight Board this coming Friday (2009-03-07) at 14 UTC, 9 EST on irc.freenode.net #sugar-meeting
  • I'll be hosting a meeting of the Education Team this coming Friday (2009-03-07) at 15 UTC, 10 EST on irc.freenode.net #sugar-meeting
  • Homunq will be hosting a Google Summer of Code meeting on Wednesday (2009-03-05) at 17 UTC, 12 EST on irc.freenode.net #sugar-meeting

Sugar Labs

Gary Martin has generated another SOM from the past week of discussion on the IAEP mailing list (Please see SOM).

Community News archive

An archive of this digest is available.

Planet

The Sugar Labs Planet is found here.

Sugar in the news

14 Feb 2009 OLPC Learning Club – DCLearning Learning on a Stick
05 Feb 2009 xcoonomySugar Beyond the XO Laptop: Walter Bender on OLPC, Sucrose 0.84, and “Sugar on a Stick”
26 Jan 2009 Linus MagazineSugar Defies OLPC Cutbacks
19 Jan 2009 Feeding the PenguinsThe status of Sugar, post-OLPC
16 Jan 2009 OLPC NewsSugar on Acer Aspire One & Thin Client via LTSP
12 Jan 2009 Bill Kerrthoughts about olpc cutbacks
07 Jan 2009 Ars TechnicaOLPC downsizes half of its staff, cuts Sugar development
06 Jan 2009 OLPC NewsAn Inside Look at how Microsoft got XP on the XO
30 Dec 2008 OLPC NewsSugar Labs Status at Six Months
22 Dec 2008 The GNOME ProjectSugar Labs, the nonprofit behind the OLPC software, is joining the GNOME Foundation
16 Dec 2008 Feeding the PenguinsSugar git repository change
14 Dec 2008 NPRLaptop Deal Links Rural Peru To Opportunity, Risk (Part 2)
13 Dec 2008 NPRLaptops May Change The Way Rural Peru Learns (Part 1)
09 Dec 2008 SFCSugar Labs joins Conservancy
31 Oct 2008 Linux DevicesAn OLPC dilemma: Linux or Windows?
10 Oct 2008 Feeding the PenguinSugar on Ubuntu
21 Sep 2008 GroklawInterview with Walter Bender of Sugar Labs
17 Sep 2008 Bill KerrSugar Labs
16 Sep 2008 Open SourceSugar everywhere
28 Aug 2008 OLPC NewsAn answer to Walter Bender's question 22
20 Aug 2008 OLPC NewsSugarize it: Intel Classmate 2
08 Aug 2008 Investor's Business Daily'Learning' Vs. Laptop Was Issue
06 Aug 2008 OLPC NewsTwenty-three Questions on Technology and Education
18 Jul 2008 Bill Kerrevaluating Sugar in the developed world
28 Jun 2008 OLPC NewsA Cutting Edge Sugar User Interface Demo
18 Jun 2008 PC WorldOLPC Spin-off Developing UI for Intel's Classmate PC
17 Jun 2008 DatamationIf Business Succeeds with GNU/Linux, Why Not OLPC?
11 Jun 2008 LinuxInsiderThe Sweetness of Collaborative Learning
06 Jun 2008 Bill Kerruntangling Free, Sugar, and Constructionism
06 Jun 2008 Open EducationWalter Bender Discusses Sugar Labs Foundation
06 Jun 2008 BusinessWeekOLPC: The Educational Philosophy Controversy
05 Jun 2008 Code CultureThe Distraction Machine
05 Jun 2008 BusinessWeekOLPC: The Open-Source Controversy
27 May 2008 The New York TimesWhy Walter Bender Left One Laptop Per Child
26 May 2008 Ars TechnicaOLPC software maker splits from X0 hardware, goes solo
22 May 2008 BetaNewsLinux start-up Sugar Labs in informal talks with four laptop makers
16 May 2008 OSTATICOLPC's Open Source Sugar Platform Aims for New Hardware
16 May 2008 PCWorldBender Forms Group to Promote OLPC's Sugar UI
16 May 2008 MHTBender jumps from OLPC, founds Sugar Labs
16 May 2008 News.comSugar Labs will make OLPC interface available for Eee PC, others
16 May 2008 Feeding the PeguinsThe future of Sugar
16 May 2008 Sugar listA few thoughts on SugarLabs
16 May 2008 xconomyBender Creates Sugar Labs—New Foundation to Adapt OLPC’s Laptop Interface for Other Machines
16 May 2008 BBC'$100 laptop' platform moves on
15 May 2008 OLPC wikiDual-boot XO Claim: OLPC will not work to port Sugar to Windows.
16 May 2008 SoftpediaBender Launches Sugar Labs for Better Development of OLPC's Sugar UI

Press releases

 9 Dec 2008 Sugar Labs/Sugar Labs joins the SFC
 15 May 2008 Sugar Labs/Announcing Sugar Labs