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

[Walter Bender]

==Sugar Digest==

1. Simon Schampijer announce that our 0.88 Release Candidate is ready
for testing. We are in "Code Freeze", only critical bug fixes can be
landed now. Any testing would be greatly appreciated. You can access
the latest bits for testing using sugar-jhbuild (update and build) or
downloading a Sugar-on-a-Stick image from
http://alt.fedoraproject.org/pub/alt/nightly-composes/soas/. There is
also a Karmic-based ppa for use on Ubuntu (See
[[http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Community/Distributions/Ubuntu#Sugar-0.88_on_Ubuntu_9.10_.28karmic.29]]).

Simon has begun pulling together release notes (See
[[http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/0.88/Notes]]).

Many thanks to Simon, our release manager, and the many community
members who have contributed to this release, including Sascha Silbe
and Aleksey Lim, both of whom have been relentless in closing tickets.

It is worth noting that many of the new features and "under-the-hood"
improvements in this release have come from "local lab" efforts. For
example, teams in Uruguay and Paraguay have led much of the
development efforts. This is due in large part to the steadfastness of
Tomeu Vizoso and Bernie Innocenti, both of whom have been working hard
to help local efforts better integrate with the Sugar upstream
project. This highly distributed model, where problems are identified
on the ground and largely addressed locally, but then integrated with
the upstream project is a powerful and sustainable model for Sugar.

2. Tim McNamara, our Google Summer of Code coordinator has been hard
at work. He has submitted our application and is now busy with the
recruitment process. You can learn more about how you might
participate in this year's program by visiting
[[http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Summer_of_Code]]. Please help spread
the word to potential candidates.

3. Josh Williams has been working on a new skin for our wiki. See
http://wiki-devel.sugarlabs.org/ to get a sense of where he is
heading. The new theme is simple, clean, and more in keeping with the
Sugar style used on our other sites.

===In the community===

4. LIBREPLANET begins on Friday, 19 March. You can learn more about
these three dats of Free Software activism at
http://groups.fsf.org/wiki/LibrePlanet2010. (I'll be participating in
the program on Saturday.)

5. Ken Haase, a former colleague of mine at MIT, has been working on a
new ebook reader that may be of interest to the Sugar community. You
can play with it by visiting http://sbooks.net. It is built in
Javascript and it has offline reading capabilities as well, which,
with Lucian Branescu's patches to Browse (which hopefully will land in
Release 0.90), it might make a very interesting Sugar activity. Ken is
also developing a site for having children add metadata to ebooks (See
http://beebooks.org for more details).

===Help wanted===

6. We are now advertising some "new easy to fix tickets" on
http://bugs.sugarlabs.org/ for anyone looking for an introductory
Sugar-related programming project. (Developers, you can use the tag
"sugar-love" to get tickets added to the list.

7. Bernie and Stefan Unterhauser (dogi) have asked if anyone would be
willing to step forward to take over maintenance of any of the
following:
* http://planet.sugarlabs.org/ (and switch it to Planet Venus!)
* http://git.sugarlabs.org/ (major upgrade needed!)
* http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/ (not a lot of work)
* http://www.sugarlabs.org/ (major revamp needed, maybe with Drupal)

===Tech talk===

8. Bert Freudenberg has been working on Sugar-Journal integration of Scratch.

9. Matt Gallagher has been working on Gnome-desktop integration of Turtle Art.

===Sugar Labs===

10. Gary Martin has generated a SOM from the past week of discussion
on the IAEP mailing list (Please see
http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/File:2010-Mar-6-12-som.jpg).

-walter

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