[Sugar-news] Sugar Digest 2009-09-30

[Walter Bender]

=== Sugar Digest ===

1. While  the decision panel debates [See
http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/iaep/2009-September/008746.html]
whether or not Sugar Labs should be a GNU/Linux distributor, I thought
it would be worthwhile surveying the GNU/Linux distribution's plans
regarding Sugar Release 0.84.

* Alexsey Lim has been using jhconvert to maintain "official"
repositories for a number of distributions, e.g., 0.86 was packaged
for Mandriva's development repository and will be in the next release,
2010.0, scheduled for 2009-11-03. Alexsey has compiled a table of the
various packaging efforts [[Development_Team/Packaging]].
* David Van Assche has been relying on jhconvert for openSUSE rpms as well.
* Peter Robinson reports that 0.86 is already in rawhide and hence
will be in the soon to be released Fedora 12 beta.
* Jonas Smedegaard reports that the plan for Debian is to maintain:
(a) the newest upstream branch (currently 0.86); (b) newest stable
branch (currently 0.84; soon to be 0.86); and possibly (c) additional
older stable releases. "In other words, the plan is to track at least
head of development and head of stable. And to leave a trail behind of
all stable releases for others to spawn off from if they so choose."
* Rubén Rodríguez Pérez has 0.86 running on Trisquel (See
[http://trisquel.info/en/trisquel-sugar]).

All of these distributions come with the core (Fructose) activities;
some, such as openSUSE, come with many additional (Honey) activities
pre-packaged. Activities.sugarlabs.org (ASLO) can be used by all
distributions to add 100s of addition activities. The updater in the
Sugar Control Panel will automatically update the activities installed
on your distribution to the latest versions.

2. Sdenka Salas, a teacher who is working with Andean children from
Aymara and Quechua communities, wrote a book in April about using
Sugar in the classroom. She recently completed the English-language
version. She has kindly made it available for download (See
[http://www.scribd.com/doc/20189623/The-XO-Laptop-in-the-Classroom]).

3. Kludge of the week: I was recently asked for a copy of one of my
talks. I give all of my talks using the presentation features of
Turtle Art and I still haven't gotten around to writing the export
function from Turtle Art to .odp (Open Office presentation). For this
particular request, I didn't think that the HTML exported from Turtle
Art was adequate. So I wrote a one-line Python call to save screen
shots into the Journal, loaded it into the Turtle Art "programmable
brick", and then added that brick to the "next slide" trigger. The
result: a copy of each slide of my talk automatically saved to the
Journal. You can see the results ([[File:Desktop-Summit.pdf]]) in the
wiki.

=== In the Community ===

4. There is a nice write up of the recent Sugar Day in Argentina (See
[http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/ReunionSeptiembre2009]).

===Sugar Labs===

5. Gary Martin has generated a SOM from the past week of discussion on
the IAEP mailing list (Please see
[[:File:2009-September-19-25-som.jpg|SOM]]).

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