[Sugar-news] Sugar Digest 2009-03-24

[Walter Bender]

===Sugar Digest ===

I have been buried in meetings over the past few days, so I am a bit
late in giving an update to the Sugar community.

First, I want to wish Rafael Enrique Ortiz Guerrero (dirakx) a rapid recovery.

While I have been distracted, lots of great work has been happening:
the Sugar on a Stick team is making great progress on the Fedora-11
port; the OLPC Learning Club held a pivotal meeting where they reached
consensus about forming a Sugar Labs DC; progress is also being made
in regard to a Sugar Lab in Peru; the Release Team has been cleaning a
few outstanding bugs in 0.84.1; the community has been busy helping
potential Google Summer of Code applicants refine their proposals;
Sascha Silbe has been setting up a build farm for Sugar Labs; the
Marketing Team has been reaching out to hundreds of more journalists
about our new release; the Localization Team has been migrating the
Pootle infrastructure to a new server; the Wiki Team has done a
reorganization of the wiki in concert with the move away from
CamelCase; and Sugar and Sugar Activities continue to be improved. A
busy week.

The big news is that thanks to the efforts of Jameson Quinn and Mel
Chua, we have been accepted into Google Summer of Code 2009. We need
to solicit and encourage as many great project proposals as we can in
the next few days (applications are due April 3): the more students
who apply to our program, the better our chances of getting more slots
assigned. Please direct potential applicants to
http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Summer_of_Code/Student_application_template
and http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Development Team/Project Ideas.

Thank you to everyone who has been answering student questions on IRC
and on the mailing list.

Tomeu Vizoso beat me to the punch by blogged about the great
contributions being made by community members (See
http://blog.tomeuvizoso.net/2009/03/what-keeps-me-going-on.html). One
crude measure of the growing ranks of contributors is the steadily
increasing number of people on #sugar on irc.freenode.net. We have
been hovering around 100 lately. It is great to see both the
continuity of long-standing contributors and the newcomers. The extent
to which the veterans are being supportive of the newcomers (and my
own barrage of naive questions) is a nice reflection on the project as
a whole.

===Tech Talk ===

We had in impromptu meeting on IRC to discuss the outstanding issues
in regard to future Fedora/Sugar support for the OLPC XO-1. The list
of work items is shorter than I would have thought and many of these
items already have teams of people working on them. We discussed as a
reasonable target being able to release these items in time for Fedora
12.
# mesh
# activation security
# Rainbow (activity security)
# activity update control panel
# power management
# library for browsing content bundles
# automatic display/keyboard language setting
# special keys on the keyboard (brightness, audio, ..)
# using USB keys in the Journal
# olpc-update
# customization key
# lease security
# UL warning screen at shutdown

Tony Forster continues to work magic with Turtle Art (See
http://tonyforster.blogspot.com/2009/03/turtle-fileview.html).

There is a new Sugar tutorial project (Please see
http://tutorius.org/blog/the-first-iteration/).

Martin Langhoff announced the availability of XS-0.5.2 this week:
http://xs-dev.laptop.org/xs/
"It fixes 3 bugs, the most notable one being the ejabberd @online@
roster issue."

Sebastian Dziallas has made a new Sugar on a Stick snapshot available at

 http://download.sugarlabs.org/soas/snapshots/2/Soas2-200903211320.iso

and a virtual appliance image at

 http://download.sugarlabs.org/soas/appliances/soas2-20090321.tar.gz

Please test them.

===Sugar Labs ===

Gary Martin has generated a SOM from the past week of discussion on
the IAEP mailing list (Please see
http://wiki.suagrlabs.org/go/Image:2009-March-14-20-som.jpg).

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