[Sugar-devel] Fedora Sugar Meeting Minutes 31/12/2009
This is it. First meeting after some time, quite some folks joined. Thanks to all those who dropped by! Here are the minutes and logs: http://meeting.olpcorps.net/fedora-olpc/fedora-olpc.minutes.20091231_1013.html http://meeting.olpcorps.net/fedora-olpc/fedora-olpc.log.20091231_1013.html Next date is the Sugar Packaging Session on Jan 6, 1500 UTC [1] - if you're interested in learning how to package, join us! --Sebastian [1] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Classroom#Upcoming_Classes ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
[Sugar-devel] Sugar Digest 2009-12-31
=== Sugar Digest === 1. The coming of a new year is a good time for reflection and setting of goals. At Sugar Labs, we have a lot to reflect upon in 2009 and a lot to look forward to in 2010. We began 2009 in engaged in a healthy debate about how best to put powerful tools for learning into the hands of children. I consider it a healthy sign that as we are reaching the end of 2009, we are still engaged in that debate. As a community, we remain passionate and outspoken about things that matter and we continue to ask how our work impacts learning. In January we felt the shock-wave of the reorganization of One Laptop per Child. As a result OLPC has more directly leveraged the efforts of the Sugar community and we have a more productive cooperation between our organizations; perhaps more important, we are beginning to see more cooperation between Sugar Labs and one-laptop-per-child deployments around the world. In March we released Sucrose 0.84 and got news of our acceptance into the Google Summer of Code program. We were establishing a reputation for being responsible and reliable members of the FOSS community. In September we learned that ''every'' child in Uruguay is now a Sugar user. In October, we exceeded 1-million downloads on activities.sugarlabs.org (At the year's end, we are over the 1,750,000-download mark). On the technical front, we reached some major milestones and saw many smaller achievements in 2009: Simon Schampijer oversaw the 0.84 and 0.86 releases and is leading the 0.88 effort; Tomeu Vizoso, who does all things Sugar, found the time to make view source universal across all activities and integrate Gnash more fully into Sugar; Sebastian Dziallas released two versions of Sugar on a Stick, leading the way for other GNU/Linux distributions to release LiveUSB images of Sugar, including Thomas C Gilliard, David Van Assche, and the openSUSE community efforts as well as Rubén Rodríguez Pérez's Triquel-based Sugar on Toast; Jonas Smedegaard continues his work on maintaining Sugar on Debian; the Fedora community's dedication to Sugar remains unparalleled(special kudos to Steven Parrish, Chris Ball, Daniel Drake, Paul Fox, Peter Robinson, Mel Chua, et al.); Bryan Berry and the team in Nepal launched the Karma project; Michael Stone made signifigant progress in making Rainbow run outside of the constrains of the OLPC deployments of Sugar; we saw patches being submitted by educators; contributions of accessibility code from Esteban Arias and the LATU team; the launch of our activity portal (thanks to Josh Williams, Aleksey Lim, and David Farning); Benjamin Schwartz made progress on GroupThink; the Activity Team made ebooks a central focus; Bernie Innocenti, David Farning, and the Infrastructure Team have given us a solid base for growth; Wade Brainerd (had a baby) and kept the Activity Team vibrant; James Simmons has been both writing some of our more popular activities and documenting how to write a Sugar activity; Sayamindu Dasgupta has done great work leading the i18n team and he made a fork of Turtle Art to support the Arduino; Raúl Gutiérrez Segalés, Martin Abente, and the team in Paraguay have made numerous contributions, including an inventory tool and 3G support (with cross-border cooperation from Daniel Castelo); and Aleksey Lim made contributions to virtually every corner of Sugar and Sugar Labs. My personal highlights for 2009 were a chance to meet so many community members face to face for the first time: Tony Forster and Bill Kerr in Melbourne; Sebastian Dziallas in Berlin; Gary Martin, Sascha Silbe, Bruno Coudoin, David Van Assche, Marten Vijn, Christian Vanizette, and Sean Daly in Paris; Pia Waugh and Donna Benjamin in Hobart; Mike Usmar in Auckland and Tabitha Roper in Wellington; Diego Uribe in Cambridge; Gerald Ardito in New York; Paul Flint, Kevin Cole, Nicco Eneidi, and Colin Applegate in Barre; Luke Farone and Jeff Elkner in Washington; Kiko Mayorga in Lima; etc. I would also be remiss in not pointing out the pleasure I got in reading Sdenka Salas's Sugar manual, Rosamel Norma Ramirez Mendez's reports from her classroom in Uruguay, Tony Foster's blog posts on Turtle Art, the posts by Bill Kerr's students on Sugar, and being greeted by a room full of children running the Sugar Speak program in a simultaneous chorus of Welcome Mr. Bender. We had set some short-term goals for ourselves in 2009: to grow our community, broaden its code base, and most important, increase the number of children using Sugar. While we may have fallen short in our goals of building a Sugar presence in the forums that teachers habituate, the vector is pointing in the right direction--teacher engagement on the Sur list being a bellwether. We did not reach as many children through Sugar on netbooks; Sugar on a Stick; and Sugar deployed through a terminal server as we are currently reaching through our OLPC collaboration--something to aim for in 2010. Our Big Overarching Goals for 2010 will be the
[Sugar-devel] Rainbow now in Debian [rainbow_0.8.6-1_i386.changes ACCEPTED]
Hi all, Rainbow has now landed in Debian Unstable (sid), and should be included in the next release of both Debian and Ubuntu. Some testing will be needed to determine whether it is sensible to enable Rainbow by default in Ubuntu/Debian Sugar installations, but full compatibility either way should be our goal. -- Forwarded message -- From: Archive Administrator instal...@ftp-master.debian.org Date: Wed, Dec 30, 2009 at 08:33 Subject: rainbow_0.8.6-1_i386.changes ACCEPTED To: Luke Faraone l...@faraone.cc, m...@debian.org Accepted: libnss-rainbow2_0.8.6-1_i386.deb to main/r/rainbow/libnss-rainbow2_0.8.6-1_i386.deb python-rainbow_0.8.6-1_all.deb to main/r/rainbow/python-rainbow_0.8.6-1_all.deb rainbow_0.8.6-1.diff.gz to main/r/rainbow/rainbow_0.8.6-1.diff.gz rainbow_0.8.6-1.dsc to main/r/rainbow/rainbow_0.8.6-1.dsc rainbow_0.8.6-1_all.deb to main/r/rainbow/rainbow_0.8.6-1_all.deb rainbow_0.8.6.orig.tar.gz to main/r/rainbow/rainbow_0.8.6.orig.tar.gz Override entries for your package: libnss-rainbow2_0.8.6-1_i386.deb - optional libs python-rainbow_0.8.6-1_all.deb - optional python rainbow_0.8.6-1.dsc - optional shells rainbow_0.8.6-1_all.deb - optional shells Announcing to debian-devel-chan...@lists.debian.org Thank you for your contribution to Debian. -- Luke Faraone http://luke.faraone.cc ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
[Sugar-devel] Ideas on how to more widely propagate Sugar Desktop in regular and VM versions of soas and opensuse-edu files (Forwarded to list)
Forwarding e-mail Open for discussion Happy New Year! Tom Gilliard satellit Bend, Oregon I am writing to you to inform on what I have doing lately to propagate sugar more widely. Thanks for this writeup, Thomas - I'd love to respond to this discussion on a public list; it may be be that other folks (like Wade) are interested and working in similar areas, but we won't be able to find and take advantage of those partnerships unless we're consistent about having these conversations in the open. Would you mind forwarding this conversation to sugar-devel? David, Walter, Sebastian - would you mind continuing the conversation there? --Mel 1-) I have built VM versions of Blueberry for VMPlayer and VitrualBox and uploaded them to: http://people.sugarlabs.org/Tgillard/Blueberry-vmx.tar.gz http://people.sugarlabs.org/Tgillard/Blueberrycleared.vdi.tar.gz 2-) I have been updating the wiki pages: http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Category:Liveusb http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/VMware http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/VirtualBox 3- )I have uploaded a copy of opensuse-edu sugar-.vmx file on sourceforge: https://sourceforge.net/projects/opensuse-edu/files/ (cyberorg got this listing and uses it for opensuse-edu builds) I have also listed this site on VMware's Free Appliance webpage: /http://www.vmware.com/appliances/directory/216653 (https://sourceforge.net/projects/opensuse-edu/files/Sugar/openSUSE-Sugar-vmware-vmx.tar.bz2/download) I wish we could set up a similar listings on sourceforge and VMware for Sugar Labs Blueberry and Strawberry so we have a second DL source. I copy a e-mail I sent asking for permission to do this: I hope you think that I am not overstepping bounds by trying to do this. The Virtual Appliances really do work well, both on a Hard Disk and as a portable USB solution...Plus the sourceforge page would be very useful for Sugar-Labs. Cordially Tom Gilliard satellit --- Thomas C Gilliard wrote: Sebastian; I used VMworkstation6.52 to make a 8GB (in 2GB slices) VM Application with soas-v2-Blueberry.iso it has 1024 memory, nat networking I did yum install anaconda then liveinst custom install /root =200 ext4 / =7989 ext4 TZ set to Los Angeles root=sugarroot As it has been said on IRC quite some times, installing SoaS directly in a VM and then redistributing this installation is not really recommendable. On boot: get progress bars and note label changed from Generic label to Soas 2 It would not start due to not having selinux=0 set (dracut halted it) That's because of the changes anaconda does with regard to our kickstart %post parts, yes. I rebooted hit ESC a number of times till I got to boot menu. TAB let me add selinux=0 to kernel commands then it booted. (on reboot it failed again) so I redid this and yum install gedit then edited /etc/sysconfig/selinux and grub to add selinux=0 to kernel commands. Did rm ~/.sugar su - shutdown -h now to clear /.sugar That removes the sugar identity, but when the machine boots the first time, it might make more changes - I'm just not sure on that, which is why I'm hesitating. :) The resulting VM Appliance is 1.7 GB I did a compression (.tar.gz )to 614.9 MB I did a upload to Tgillard then a test download It works well Cool! Good to hear that. I have loaded the expanded download to a 2 GB USB and it starts as it should in VMPlayer The memory requirements can be changed in VMPlayer to 256 and it runs fine. Hope this explains my methodology to create this. Yeah, thanks for the detailed write-up! As I said, I'm not sure whether using an installer is sustainable for creating virtual appliances. Have you already had a chance to look at thincrust.net? This is where the tools to create an appliance like a live image live. Maybe it would make sense for you and Wade, who was been looking into virtual solutions for Sugar on a Stick too, to join forces? I'm copying to this e-mail just in case. Regards Tom Gilliard satellit Keep up the cool work! --Sebastian Sebastian Dziallas wrote: Walter Bender wrote: On Wed, Dec 16, 2009 at 12:38pm, Thomas C Gilliard satel...@bendbroadband.com wrote: I have created a Blueberry.vmx file and uploaded it to Tgillard. It is in compressed form, and works well when decompressed and copied to a 2GB USB stick, or used from the computer with VMPlayer (free download but non free software...) I am asking permission to list it on the VMware web site as a free Download. http://www.vmware.com/appliances/directory/ I need your permission to do this. Pros Cons: *It will give us more exposure. *It require a full uncompressed file 1.7GB for downloading from Tgillard. *non free issues. Let me think about this one. My immediate reaction is that we are providing other (libre) means of using our software, so this is
[Sugar-devel] g.sl.o issues for Karma and perhaps other activities
I want to discuss some issues for managing Karma lessons on glso. Please let it be clear that I am not criticizing the infrastructure team __at_all__. I think they are doing a great job. The issues I am encountering have to do with underlying tools and some issues specific to developers working in countries w/ crappy bandwidth, such as Nepal. Some of the main goals of the Karma Project are to get more developers in general involved in creating content for Sugar and to make OLE Nepal's content development more accessible and open to developers inside and outside Nepal. We have a full-time team of 7 sw engineers, 3 graphic designers, and 3 teachers working on content. It would be a crying shame if we can't work with the larger community. One big problem for devs here in Nepal is that international bandwidth is both lousy and expensive. Conversely, w/in Kathmandu bandwidth is relatively high-speed and cheap. I have up to 2 Mbps w/in Nepal but get around 30 kbps for a site hosted outside Nepal. The Karma repos are big and there will soon be many. The main Karma repo will be 10-15 MB and each individual lesson will be in its own repo, usually 2-4 MB. I hope to have about 60 individual karma activities under source control. That will be easily 200 MB. Transferring files of that size over slow international links will really cramp our development cycle. At the same time we need for the Karma lessons to be easily accessible internationally. A working solution will have to start with a server inside Nepal hosting the Karma content. OLE Nepal can likely provide the server space. Would it be possible for us to set up our own instance of gitorious? My impression is that everyone is waiting to move to the gitorious instance but something is holding it up. Even if g.sl.o migrates to gitorious.org how difficult would it be to set up an instance in Nepal. Or will it be too hard to set up a gitorious instance and we should just use something simple for Karma like cgit? So say we do set up an instance of gitorious here in Nepal. How could we make it easy for others outside Nepal to access the code and contribute back? If you are outside Nepal, downloading from a server in Nepal also sucks due to the bandwidth issue. Would it be feasible to set up a read-only mirror of Nepal's repositories on the Sugar infrastructure? I would like there to be a writable set of repositories on an international server but I can't imagine how the this mirror would sync w/ the Nepal server without lots of nasty conflicts. Sugaristas, please let me know what you think ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
