[Sugar-news] Sugar Digest 2008-12-23

[Walter Bender]

=== Sugar Digest ===

1. gitorious: It was time to try migrating TurtleArt, the project I am
maintaining, over to git.sugarlabs.org. The new git system we are
using, gitorious, has a user interface that is more "web-friendly"
than any git systems I have used before. It does a good job of leading
through the process of creating new projects. One of the nice things
about it is that anyone can create or fork a project unilaterally,
thus I think it will work well with the distributed nature of Sugar
development. (So fork your favorite project (TurtleArt) in order to
try out your ideas!!!) I would recommend Marco Pesenti Gritti's <a
href="http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/DevelopmentTeam/Git">quick guide to
migrating projects</a> and you may want to <a
href="http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/User:Walter#gitorious">learn from
my mistakes</a> as well.

2. Sugar and GNOME:

:BOSTON, Mass — December 22, 2008 — Sugar Labs, a member of the
Software Freedom Conservancy, is joining the GNOME Foundation as part
of the GNOME Advisory Board. Sugar Labs creates software for young
children used on platforms like the One Laptop Per Child's XO. Sugar
is based on the GNOME platform and relies on technologies like GTK+
and Telepathy.

:"The resources made available by the GNOME project have been
essential to the development of the Sugar learning platform", says
Walter Bender, executive director of Sugar Labs. "The Sugar community
looks forward to working more closely with the GNOME Foundation on
topics such as GNOME Mobile and an upstream collaboration framework."
Walter Bender will be representing Sugar Labs on the GNOME Advisory
Board.

:GNOME forms the basis of many platforms such as Sugar, Maemo, and
Ubuntu Netbook Remix, and also delivers the desktop platform offered
by companies such as Novell, Red Hat and Sun Microsystems. GNOME is
actively cooperating with the makers of these platforms in order to
make sure that they can use GNOME technologies as efficiently and
effectively as possible and to enable cross-fertilization of
resources. Members of the GNOME Advisory Board help the GNOME
Foundation work with partner companies effectively and they also get a
chance to collaborate with each other on their use of GNOME
technologies.

:"The GNOME Foundation is excited to have Sugar Labs join the advisory
board." says Stormy Peters, executive director of the GNOME
Foundation. "Sugar embodies the GNOME mission of making sure
technology is available to anyone, not just technical people,
regardless of culture, financial well-being or physical ability. The
interface provided by Sugar offers an innovative way to interact with
technology and the internet. This work is heavily influencing the
GNOME community as they think about potential ways to improve GNOME in
the future."

3. Sugar Labs™: Karen Sandler, a lawyer at the Software Freedom
Conservancy, who has been helping us will all things legal has
confirmed that our trademark application for the name Sugar Labs has
been submitted to the USPTO (with the Conservancy, our parent
organization, named as the applicant). "They indicate in our receipt
that it will be 4–5 months before we are assigned an examining
attorney. In the meantime the mark is a 'pending' application." Karen
will start working on a trademark policy for
Sugar that we will post in the wiki.

4. Mobilis (Encore): It is summer in Brazil. Paulo Drummond was the
first one to bring to my attention that Mobilis has won a bid to bring
150,000 laptops to children in Brazil. (OLPC did not participate in
the bid.) As I understand it, it will be running a Mandriva
distribution of GNU/Linux. There has already been some preliminary
discussion about a Sugar port to Mandriva. Let's make it happen.

5. <a href="http://www.dailymotion.com">Dailymotion</a> seems to be
the site where videos about learning projects are being aggregated.
Sebastian Silva pointed out these video on the Sur list this week:

* http://www.dailymotion.com/primariamultigrado/video/x4dfmt_comunidad-educa-en-gillipcha-chacha_school
* http://www.dailymotion.com/primariamultigrado/video/x49m4e_comunidad-educa-en-tucaque-fras_school
* http://www.dailymotion.com/primariamultigrado/video/x4cz21_comunidad-educa-en-san-jos-de-sisa_school
* http://www.dailymotion.com/primariamultigrado

6. Hilaire Fernandes, who brought us DrGeo, has <a
href="http://www.istoa.net">a new project</a> underway:

:I am working on a learning system written in Smalltalk. The contents
is only in French for now, and only cover multiplication learning, but
I am planing for more in various subjects. Underneath the curriculum
is in a graph to help situating the learning progression of the
learner.

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

7. 9–11 January <a
href="http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FUDCon/FUDConF11">FUDConF11</a> at
MIT (Cambridge, MA)

8. 25 April 2009 <a
href="http://installfest.info/FLISOL2009/Venezuela/Caracas">El
Festival Latinoamericano de Instalación de Software Libre (FLISoL)</a>
in Caracas, Venezuela

9. Lionel Laske posted a <a
href="http://olpc-france.org/wiki/index.php?title=CodeCampReport">report
about the OLPC France Code Camp</a> held on 25 November in Paris. 40
attendees participated in a series of workshops:
* The learning workshop participants drafted requirements for a French
version of WikiBrowse and investigated the possibility of doing
animation on an OLPC-XO.
* The translation workshop participants translated the FLOSS Manual.
* The School Server participants workshop focused on network configuration.
* The Sugar workshop participants workd on a Mind-Mapping activity and
video integration.
* The Mono workshop participants wrote tutorials about designing Sugar
Activity for C#/Mono developers.

=== Help wanted ===

10. I will try feature a small project each week that someone from the
community could tackle. Would someone be willing to create a page in
the wiki on how to use IRC? (And perhaps embed a web-based client such
as <a href="http://www.mibbit.com">Mibbit</a> somewhere?) Thanks.

=== Tech Talk ===

11. NM: Simon Schampijer landed wired-interface support for Network
Manager. While doing that he reviewed and reworked the "device
appears" logic with Eben Eliason. Simon also fixed a bug that could
cause the wireless dialog to not appear.

12. Sucrose 0.83.3: Simon also did help to get <a
href="http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/DevelopmentTeam/Release/Releases/Sucrose/0.83.3">Sucrose
0.83.3</a> out of the door. The following modules were released this
week:

* sugar-0.83.4
* sugar-base-0.83.2
* sugar-datastore-0.83.1
* sugar-toolkit-0.83.3
* sugar-artwork-0.83.2

13. There were also lots of updates to Sugar Activities this week:

* Jukebox-6
* Read-62
* Browse-102
* Chat-61
* TurtleArt-24 (it will now export Logo code to the Journal)
* TurtleArtwithSensors-5 (updated to accommodate the switch from
numeric to numpy)
* ImageViewer-5
* Terminal-21
* Colors!-13

14. Bert Freudenberg made a virtual machine that allows one to <a
href="http://croquetweak.blogspot.com/2008/12/emulating-latest-stable-olpc-xo.html
emulate the XO</a> "in VMWare on a Mac, running Sugar in the XO's
native 1200x900 resolution, scaled down to a nice physical size in a
window on a regular screen (fullscreen works, too)."

15. Etoys 4.0: Bert also announced the first release of Etoys 4.0 this
week. The major version jump signifies the end of a two-year
relicensing effort.

:Originally released in 1996, Apple relicensed the Squeak core under
the Apache 2.0 license in October 2006 – thanks to Steve, Alan Kay,
and the lawyers involved. Then, Viewpoints Research collected written
relicensing agreements from several hundred later contributors under
the MIT license – thanks to Kim Rose and the Squeak community
volunteers. Finally, all the code in Etoys not explicitly covered by a
relicensing agreement was removed, or rewritten, or reverted to an
earlier version – kudos to Yoshiki Ohshima for the bulk of that work.

We are all looking forward to see Etoys properly packaged in more
distributions now that the licensing issues have been cleared up.

Sources:
* http://download.sugarlabs.org/sources/sucrose/glucose/etoys/etoys-4.0.2201.tar.gz
* http://download.sugarlabs.org/sources/sucrose/fructose/Etoys/Etoys-97.tar.gz

Packaged:
* http://etoys.laptop.org/rpms/etoys-4.0.2201-1.noarch.rpm
* http://etoys.laptop.org/rpms/Etoys-97.xo

=== Sugar Labs ===

16. Self-organizing map (SOM): Gary Martin has generated another SOM
from the past week of discussion on the IAEP mailing list (Please see
<a href="http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Image:2008-December-13-19-som.jpg">SOM</a>).

-walter

-- 
Walter Bender
Sugar Labs
http://www.sugarlabs.org