[Sugar-news] Sugar Digest 2010-04-01

[Walter Bender]

==Sugar Digest==

1. Simon Schampijer and the Sugar release team announced Sucrose 0.88
last night. This is fourth Sugar release since we launched Sugar Labs
last year. Beyond the significance of the numerous improvements made
to Sugar over the past six months is the professionalism of the
release team. They have a predictable process; this means that
deployments can reliably anticipate how Sugar will be able to meet
their needs. Also significant is the degree to which deployments
participated in this release. Most of the feature requests and many of
the patches came from the field. This is a healthy sign, both in terms
of Sugar's long-term sustainability and relevance.

You can read about Sucrose 0.88 at
http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/0.88/Notes, where you will find the
extensive notes compiled by Simon and the team. (Note that many of the
0.88 features have been backported to Sugar 0.84, the version of Sugar
initially being deployed on the OLPC XO 1.5 machines.)

Many thanks to the Sugar community.

2. There has been a heated debate regarding the inclusion of Adobe
Flash support on the laptop.org developer list that the Sugar
community may find interesting. Please see these threads
[http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/devel/2010-March/027838.html] and
[http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/devel/2010-March/027865.html] as
well as a post from Chris Ball from a previous instantiation of the
debate [http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/iaep/2009-January/003516.html]
in 2009).

===In the community===

3. I gave the keynote this past weekend at a Hult International
Business School Case Study event. They held a contest for proposals
regarding the future of One Laptop per Child. I got to play the role
of historian and also had the opportunity to plan a seed regarding a
future study of Sugar Labs.

4. The DC Learning Club held a sprint this past weekend in order to
update the getting started guide] on the laptop.org website. When they
"push" their changes, they will have updated much of the Sugar
material on the site.

5. Rita Freudenberg announced that the University of North Carolina
Wilmington will be the host for this year's USA Squeakfest! You are
invited to a face-to-face gathering, sharing of experiences and
materials relative to the usage of Etoys, July 26, 27 and 28th.

===Help wanted===

6. 2010 Google Summer of Code intern candidates are beginning to
circulate proposals. Please give them feedback.

===Tech talk===

7. Thomas C Gilliard has built a first pass Sugar Creation kit as a
DVD iso image. The idea is to have a DVD that can be used to create
Sugar on a Stick USB keys and to install Sugar onto your computer's
hard drive. The image (which is quite large) can be found at
http://people.sugarlabs.org/Tgillard/Sugar-Creation-Kit-ver05.iso.

8. Paraguay Educa technology team has released a Sugar/F11 image for
field testing in their Caacupé pilot:
[http://people.sugarlabs.org/bernie/olpc/f11-xo1-py/os115.img],[http://people.sugarlabs.org/bernie/olpc/f11-xo1-py/os115.crc],
[http://people.sugarlabs.org/bernie/olpc/f11-xo1-py/os115.img.fs.zip].

The image is "a derivative of Stephen Parrish's excellent F11-XO1
series, frozen a few weeks ago to concentrate on stability and field
testing." The team's short-term goal is to meet a release criteria of
"no regressions against build 801". Once this is done, they plan to
synchronize with the latest improvements from our upstreams, F11-XO1.5
and F11-XO1.

===Sugar Labs===

9. Gary Martin has generated a self-organizing map
[http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/File:2010-Mar-20-26-som.jpg] from the
past week of discussion on the IAEP mailing list.

10. Visit http://planet.sugarlabs.org for more updates about Sugar and
Sugar deployments.

-walter

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