[Sugar-news] Sugar Digest 2011-08-22

[Walter Bender]

== Sugar Digest ==

1. The OLPC XO 1.75 machines (beta units) are starting to be
distributed to developers. This machine is ARM based, which means that
it will have superior battery life once all of the fine-tuning is
complete. It also means that it uses some different components, e.g.,
audio circuitry, so there is some driver work to be done. But so far,
so good.

One of the nice things about the 1.75 is that the OLPC engineering
team threw in a few additional sensors. Saadia Husain Baloch got the
accelerometer working and I immediately wrote a Turtle Art plug-in
(included with v114). Saadia wrote a fun 'etch-a-sketch' program in
Turtle Art that works by shaking the machine.

Not to be outdone, I added an enhancement to the Portfolio activity
while I was on a short flight last week. If you hit the left side of
the XO, it will advance to the next slide. If you hit the right side
of the XO, it will return to the previous slide. The person sitting
next to me on the plane told me, "That's the strangest thing I have
ever seen anyone do with a computer."

The bottom line is the more sensors the better: we want to give young
learners more opportunities to observe and interactive with the
physical world.

2. At the Desktop Summit held in Berlin earlier this month, the Senate
of Berlin and TSB Technology Foundation Berlin presented an award for
promising project ideas based on open software to be realized in
Berlin. The prize was given to Raffael Reichelt for his idea of
opening real labs as a place for children to learn and work with
Sugar.

=== In the community ===

3. The September (10–11) Paris Sugar Camp [1] is building up momentum.
Preliminary program:
* Saturday morning: “Fix Sugar Docs” camp (Part 1);
* Saturday afternoon:  Plenary session (OLPC France’s activities, OLPC
deployment feedback, etc.);
* Sunday morning: “Fix Sugar Docs” camp (Part 2);
* Sunday afternoon: CodeCamp (bug hunting, code reviews, learning
Sugar, ideas, etc.)

4. At the end of October (28–30) there will be a GTK3 hackfest [2] at
the BRMLAB Hacker Space in Prague. The focus will be:
* removing Hippo and other custom widgets;
* migration path to GTK3 (Do we ship two toolkits? Do we migrate the
shell and the toolkit and activities at once?);
* porting Sugar's theme to GTK3;
* other introspected libraries that need work (namely Network Manager)
For more background on the hackfest goals, which is a follow-up of the
Desktop Summit gathering, see [3] and [4].

=== Tech Talk ===

5. The Sugar localization/developer/design/activity/release/testing
teams have been busy working on the 0.94 release. This release [5]
will feature:
* the reenabling of a filter in Home View (important now that there
are so many activities);
* a more efficient Activity-startup animation;
* the ability to duplicate (with the intention of modifying)
activities from the  View Source submenu
* View Source for the sugar-toolkit;
* $HOME/Documents added to the Journal Volumes toolbar to facilitate
access to files created outside of Sugar;
* enhancements to the wireless-network Frame device, including adding
text for disconnected state;
* support for removing connections and “forgetting” network credentials;
* standardization to an improved reference design for Sugar toolbars;
* refactoring of pootle/git interface to bring the location efforts into sync

Many thanks to everyone who has been working so hard on this release.

6. Mageia [6], a Mandriva-based distribution, now has Sugar support (See [7]).

=== Sugar Labs ===

Gary Martin has generated a SOM from the past few weeks of discussion
on the IAEP mailing list.

2011 August 6th–12th (28 emails) [8]

Visit our planet [9] for more updates about Sugar and Sugar deployments.

---

1. http://olpc-france.org/blog/sugar-camp-2011-in-paris/
2. http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Marketing_Team/Events/Gtk3_Hackfest_2011
3. http://www.itevenworks.net/2011/08/catching-up-with-sugar-running-gtk3-activities/
4. http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Features/GTK3/DesktopSummitActivities
5. http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/0.94/Feature_List
6. http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Community/Distributions/Mageia
7. https://bugs.mageia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1969
8. http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/File:2011-Aug-6-12-som.jpg
9. http://planet.sugarlabs.org

-walter

Walter Bender
Sugar Labs
http://sugarlabs.org