[Sugar-news] Sugar Digest 2012-09-18

[Walter Bender]

== Sugar Digest ==

1. Bradley and Tony have ask us for a summary of Sugar Labs activity
for the Software Freedom Conservancy annual report. It has been a busy
year, with tremendous progress on the technical front, but also real
in roads into better understanding how to deploy Sugar in a wide
variety of contexts.

;GTK-3: The major technical effort over the past twelve months has
been the transition to GNOME Toolkit 3. The developer team, lead by
Simon Schampijer, has migrated Sugar to GTK-3 and in the process both
made Sugar easier to maintain and also easier to support on devices
such as the OLPC XO 4.0 Touch. This has been a community effort with
contributions coming from engineers at OLPC, Activity Central, and the
Sugar community at large.

;Sugar Activities: Our "app store" continues to grow, thanks in large
part to contributions from Sugar users who have made the transition to
Sugar developers. More than 10% of our apps were written by children
who grew up with Sugar. Meanwhile, we are approaching eight-million
downloads.

;The next generation of hackers: Not only are Sugar users becoming
Sugar activity developers, they are also beginning to work on Sugar
itself. A large part of the effort to migrate Sugar activities to
GTK-3 has been accomplished by youths; and these same young hackers
are submitting patches to the Sugar toolkit as well. They are
full-fledge members of our community.

;Internationalization push: Internationalization push: Chris Leonard
has led an effort to recruit and assist translation teams so that
Sugar has better coverage in the mother tongues and indigenous
languages of our users. Over the past twelve months, we have seen
substantive progress in the languages of:
:* Oceania:  Māori, Samoan (Gagana Sāmoa), Niuean (Vagahau Niue)
:* Central and South America: Huastec (Tének), Xi'úi (Central Pame),
Aymara (Aru), Quechua (Cusco-Collao)

:These efforts have often included working with the local experts to
establish glibc locales for their languages, which will facilitate
further localization work on any Linux-based system.

;Sugar in the USA: While the majority of Sugar users are in Latin
America and Africa, we are starting to make in roads into the United
States. Programs like the ones led by Gerald Ardito have demonstrated
the efficacy of Sugar within the US educational market. Larger-scale
efforts by OLPC in Miami and Charlotte a driving growth.

;Teacher communities: Teachers are forming communities around Sugar to
provide mutual support and to drive further pedagogical developments.
They are using social media tools to form communities in which
teachers and developers discuss problems and opportunities. Amazonas,
Australia, et al. are leading the way.

;Local initiatives: We have back down from our formal "local labs"
initiative, but not from working locally. There are strong local
support teams in Uruguay, Argentina, Peru, etc., working on extending
Sugar to support local needs.

;Sugar on a Stick: There have been more than 500,000 visits to the
Sugar on a Stick page (a version of Sugar that will run on any
x86-based computer that can boot from a USB stick).

;GNU/Linux distributions: Thomas Gilliard compiled a list of
distributions that have seen significant advances in the past year.
:* Sugar Network [1] (Aleksey Lim et al.)
:: Fedora-14 based OLPC OS for XO laptops (i586)
:: Ubuntu-10.04 and derivatives (i586, x86_64)
:: Ubuntu-11.10 and derivatives (i586, x86_64)
:: Ubuntu-11.04 and derivatives (i586, x86_64)
:: Ubuntu-10.10 and derivatives (i586, x86_64)
:* Trisquel [2] 5.0 and 5.5 (Ruben Rodríguez)
:* openSUSE-EDU [3] (Jigish Gohil and Dram Wang)
:* ARM [4] (Peter Robinson)
:* Fedora 18 [5]
:* Mageia [6]

;Community outreach: Sugar Labs provided support for several developer
gatherings, including Sugar Camps in Lima Peru, Cambridge Mass, San
Francisco CA, Prague Czech Republic, and GUADEC.

2. Isabelle Duston has created a database of images ([7]) that is
intended to reduce the cost of creating educational apps in particular
for literacy. Feel free to use these images in your Sugar activities
and to contribute to the database. She is also launching an App
Challenge (See [8]); Sugar activities qualify.

3. Edgar Quispe has finished 100% of Aymara for Fructose, a major step
in supporting local languages in Peru. Quechua is also making rapid
progress.

=== In the community ===

4. There are plans to hold the next OLPC SF summit in San Francisco
the weekend of October 19-21. We are holding a Sugar Camp
''following'' the summit (Oct 22-24). Please register at [9].

=== Tech Talk ===

5. Simon Schampijer announced the "I am a GTK+ 3 shell" release of
Sugar and the Sugar toolkit (See [10]).

6. Daniel Drake announced that a new 13.1.0 development build is
available (This one comes with the first development release of the
GTK-3 port of Sugar and probably a fair number of bugs for you to help
us find and solve.) See [11].

7. Thomas Gilliard reports at there is a new live CD of Sugar on
openSUSE available that incorporates 0.96.2, the current "stable"
version of Sugar. ([12], [13])

=== Sugar Labs ===

Visit our planet [14] for more updates about Sugar and Sugar deployments.

=== Personal Note ===

On Monday, September 10, I became a grandfather. Looking forward to
some Turtle Blocks fun with Theo Max [15] in a few years.
-walter

----

[1] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_Network
[2] Trisquel http://devel.trisquel.info/dagda/iso/
[3] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/OpenSUSE#openSUSE_12.2-sugar_0.96.2
[4] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_Creation_Kit/sck/Advanced_Topics#ARM
[5] http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/alt/stage/18-Alpha-RC3/
[6] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Mageia
[7] http://www.art4apps.org/
[8] http://www.educationappsforall.org
[9] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Sugarcamp_SF_2012
[10] http://download.sugarlabs.org/sources/sucrose/glucose/sugar/sugar-0.97.3.tar.bz2
[11] http://wiki.laptop.org/go/13.1.0
[12] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/OpenSUSE#openSUSE_12.2-sugar_0.96.2
[13] http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/dramwang:/images-unstable/images/iso/sugar.i686-0.3.0-Build1.2.iso
[14] http://planet.sugarlabs.org
[15] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Image:TheoMax.jpg


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