[Dextrose] About Activity Central and Dextrose (was: [ANNOUNCE] New Dextrose-3 development build: Alpha-1 (dx3ng36))

[Pablo Flores]

Since in Activity Central (AC) we're announcing our work in a new release of
Dextrose, I found it's a good moment for saying some words about Dextrose
itself, the company and the way we work.

Dextrose is a Sugar downstream begun by Bernie, working together with AC and
Paraguay Educa folks to focus on the most important needs of deployments.
Stability is prioritized over adding new features and there is a focus on
having a close loop between deployments and developers. With time Dextrose
got adapted by other deployments, like Plan Ceibal in Uruguay, who also made
important contributions to the system.

Since the Dextrose2 release, the development has been guided by AC’s team,
mainly led by Anish and Alsroot's work. All its code continues to be free
(all the software produced by AC is GPL'ed), and upstreamed as much as
possible with the great work made by Silbe in collaboration with many
community actors (although there are still some parts which take more time
to upstream but are also included as they're useful for deployments).

With the new release, we're looking to continue AC's goal of catalyzing
Sugar development, working together with partners, deployments, and the
community. AC work is about providing Sugar software development and support
services, and the best way to do it is the open source way.

BTW, in AC we'll soon have a new Web site where we can explain our work in a
better way. All feedback is welcome!

Regards,
Pablo Flores
Activity Central

On Tue, Aug 30, 2011 at 2:16 PM, Anish Mangal <anish at activitycentral.org>wrote:

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> Hi,
>
> It gives me pleasure to announce the release of our first dextrose-3
> development image, alpha-1. I thank ActivityCentral, OLPC,
> OLPC-Australia and Sugarlabs for working in close coordination and
> making this release possible.
>
> The key points of this release are:
> * Based on fedora-14
> * Based on sugar version 0.92.4
> * Porting of most dextrose-2 patches into dextrose-3.
> * Upstreaming of a few dextrose-2 patches. We're trying to upstream as
> much as we can, but its a slow process.
> * Uses the 0.9x collaboration code.
> * These images don't contain gnome. The next development release
> (alpha-2) will contain gnome.
>
> Broadly, Dextrose-3 is close to FeatureFreeze [1], and is following this
> roadmap [2].
>
> Here are the download links for the install images:
>
> === xo-1 ===
> http://download.sugarlabs.org/dextrose/testing/dx3/xo1/dx3ng036.img
> http://download.sugarlabs.org/dextrose/testing/dx3/xo1/dx3ng036.crc
>
> === xo1.5 ===
> http://download.sugarlabs.org/dextrose/testing/dx3/xo1.5/dx3ng036.zd
> http://download.sugarlabs.org/dextrose/testing/dx3/xo1.5/dx3ng036.zd.md5
>
> Note:
> * You will need an unlocked XO to test/install these images
> * This is a development alpha-release, there are and will be rough
> edges, particularly in the area of collaboration, and some
> dextrose-specific features.
> * Folks are encouraged to test this release and file tickets on
> bugs.sugarlabs.org and tag them by assigning the 'dx3' keyword. The
> dextrose team will triage them and start fixing.
> * Though dx-3-alpha-1 uses sugar 0.92.x, it is not yet certain future
> dextrose releases will do the same [3]. That is being worked out at the
> moment through discussion.
>
> ==Release Notes==
>
> This release is intended to be in sync with OLPC-11.2.0, the release
> notes for which can be found here [4]. There will be differences in
> activity lists and sugar itself, which would have dextrose specific
> patches (latest-patchset date 2011-08-15)
>
> ===Activities===
>
> * Abacus-22
> * Arithmetic-2
> * Browse-123
> * Calculate-37
> * Chat-70
> * Colors-15
> * Distance-25
> * Etoys-113
> * Flipsticks-8
> * Fototoon-8
> * Get_books-9
> * Image_viewer-17
> * Implode-10
> * Irc-10
> * Jukebox-22
> * Labyrinth-11
> * Log-25
> * Maze-11
> * Measure-33
> * Memorize-36
> * Moon-12
> * Paint-36
> * Physics-8
> * Pippy-40
> * Poll-27
> * Read-90
> * Record-92
> * Ruler-11
> * Speak-30
> * Spirolaterals-22
> * Stopwatch-11
> * Tamtammini-59
> * Terminal-34
> * Turtle_art-114
> * Turtle_machine-22
> * Typing_turtle-27
> * Visual_match-29
> * Words-11
> * Write-75
>
> ===Issues fixed===
>
> * sl#2803 [dx3] Build dx3ng010 for xo-1 tries to install q3a62 firmware
> (which is actually meant for xo-1.5)
>
> * sl#2483 Neighborhood view is sometimes greyed out or owner buddy is
> missing
>
> * sl#2805 Opening neighborhood view just reveals a gray screen
>
> * sl#2806 [dx3] Missing central-xo icon in neighborhood view
>
> * sl#2878 python-beautiful soup dependency lacking on dextrose
> (was:Read-89 does not start on Sugar 0.88)
>
> * sl#2889 Speak Detection of australian-english
>
> * au#825 Software Update fails to upgrade content bundles
>
> ...and...
>
> * sl#2807 [dx3] dx3ng010-xo1.5: boot animation has too many hydrogen
> atoms ;) ;)
>
> Note: This list won't be very exhaustive since it is the first release
> in the dx3 series.
>
> ===Known Issues===
>
> * Accessibility won't work very well since its supporting packages
> weren't included in this build. This will be fixed in alpha-2.
> * Collaboration is somewhat broken (See 11.2.0 release notes for a more
> detailed explanation).
> * Backup restore functionality doesn't work as the required packages
> aren't included yet.
>
> [1] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Dextrose/3/FeatureFreeze
> [2] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Dextrose/3/Roadmap
> [3] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Dextrose/3/SugarVersion
> [4] http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Release_notes/11.2.0
>
> - --
> Anish Mangal
> Dextrose Project Manager
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