[Sugar-news] Sugar Digest 2009-03-17

[Walter Bender]

===Sugar Digest ===

1. The Sucrose 0.84 release is now official! Simon Schampijer and
Tomeu Vizoso have put together comprehensive release notes (See
[[DevelopmentTeam/Release/Releases/Sucrose/0.84]]). The long list of
new features is impressive. And Sean Daly is spreading the word,
having launched a major media blitz, a first for Sugar Labs, that has
already gotten Sugar 0.84 exposure on Market Watch, Reuters, and
Forbes. More to come.

2. In preparation for the media campaign, there has been a lot of work
done behind the scenes to make the wiki more easily searchable and
navigable. Fred Grose has been the driving force behind a wiki
reorganization, which includes a subpage menu for each of the major
sections. Plus, he has eliminated most of the CamelCase in the wiki
that was interfering with search.

3. Aleksey Lim is making sure that all of our efforts are being put to
good use. His ost recent magic is a revamped Sugar for Caixa Mágica,
the distribution used by Project Magellan (Magalhães) and numerous
other projects. Meanwhile, Sasche Silbe is working on keeping Sugar on
Ubuntu up to date.

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

4. The OLPC Learning Club – DC is hosting a Family XO Mesh Meetup on
Saturday, 21 March 2009 (http://olpclearningclub.org).

===Help Wanted / Help Received ===

5. Jameson Quinn and Mel Chua have submitted our Google Summer of Code
(GSoC) application. We have 10 mentors and a growing list of project
ideas. While the number of interns who will be formally participating
in GSoC will be relatively small, the mentoring framework being put
into place will have impact above and beyond that one program. For
example, Jeff Elkner sent out an email asking for mentoring support
for some student projects; he got an overwhelming response from the
community. Mentoring is a key to our growth.

===Tech Talk ===

6. Sebastian Dziallas has also been working some magic. He has created
a snapshot of the Sugar-on-a-Stick image (SoaS-2) as a virtual
machine. (Note that SoaS-2 is the Fedora 11 version of Sugar on a
Stick.)

http://download.sugarlabs.org/soas/appliances/soas2-20090315.tar.gz

"In this tar.gz archive you'll find a .vmdk and a .xml file. The .vmdk
file is nothing more than the disk image for VMware. You should be
able to import it easily, also in other applications supporting this
file type, such as VirtualBox (in which I tested it).

"Please be aware that this image is still pre-alpha! It has quite a
few bugs and is certainly not as stable as the SoaS-2 .iso images."

Sebastian has created this image by hand, but will start building them
at the same time as the .iso files.

===Sugar Labs ===

7. Gary Martin has generated a SOM from the past week of discussion on
the IAEP mailing list (Please see [[Image:2009-March-7-13-som.jpg]]).

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