sdziallas talks

There's something in the air that's desperately needed for Sugar on a Stick and its future development: deployments - as a central pillar of its philosophy.

Caroline and Simon are already using it in Boston and Berlin and now there's a new one emerging. Mel and Lynne May are going to run a local deployment. In a way, this is going to lower the entry-barrier for other people interested in running deployments.

Mel's blog post has all the awesome details, so I'll just refer you there.

Now what can you do? As you've probably heard, Sugar on a Stick is going to become a Fedora Spin. This is important, because it's a significant part of the effort to make the whole SoaS project sustainable. So we need help especially concerning packaging and reviewing activities [1], to ensure a consistent user experience compared to the former releases. We've a wiki page and a tracking bug, as well as weekly meetings in #fedora-olpc on 1500 UTC.

Just stop by and introduce yourself - do so on-list.

[1] If you're new to packaging software for Fedora, you might be interested in skimming the logs of our recent Fedora Classroom session.

So you're interested in the Fedora Sugar effort? Awesome. Well, as promised, we're going to have a Sugar Packaging Session through the Fedora Classroom program this Wednesday. We'll be in #fedora-classroom, on 1500 UTC, so make sure to drop by. If you can, please have Gobby installed, which we'll use for collaboratively working on docs!

Here's your chance! Join us for the upcoming weekly Fedora Sugar meetings in #fedora-olpc starting tomorrow, Dec 31 on 1500 UTC.

We're going to talk about packaging (especially Sugar Activities) and all kinds of stuff that helps us making the F13 Sugar experience better.

You don't know how to package things for Fedora? Don't worry, we've a Fedora Classroom session coming up on Jan 6 - more details here.

This post has been due for quite some time now, but I finally got to writing it. This is about teachers and the tools they're using. Mel Chua has attended the K12 Open Minds conference some time ago and transcribed a session on open source software teachers recommended. From this list, I've composed a wiki page, listing which applications have already been packaged and which not. The latter one gives us about twenty apps that are currently not in Fedora. So, what's next?

• Just go here: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/K12_Open_Minds
• Look for an unpackaged app you're interested in.
• Do this (you'll probably know that already).
• If you run into trouble, just shoot the education-list an e-mail!

Last note: It's a wiki - go ahead and edit straight away and add comments, links and whatsoever.

The RIT folks rock. Mind you, they are the ones who continue to pursue the way of Greg's fabulous Math4 effort. One of them, Alex Jones, is working on making teachers' lives easier. His project is basically a question & answer mechanism, that provides results and statistics on how the class scored through the Sugar interface. Sounds cool, right? So he has a flash prototype up and running (it's a prototype and will be coded in Python once the design has been finalized) and is looking for feedback - especially from teachers. If you've got a spare minute, go, give this a try and get back to him. Thanks!

...to a Fedora installation near you. Yes, that's true. TypePad Motion, that got announced earlier this month, is now in Fedora 11 and 12, as well as in EPEL 5 (testing for now). Basically, it's a microblogging platform writting in Python and based on Django. And that's how it looks like. Want to give it a try? yum install typepad-motion does the trick.

Then you can directly run django-admin typepadproject mymotion --settings=motion.settings which will give you a folder called mymotion in your current directory. Switching to this folder and running python manage.py runserver should already get you an idea whether it's working. Entering http://127.0.0.1:8000 in your webbrowser is also a good idea, in case you're trying this locally. Works? Congrats! What's next?

You'll need to adjust the local_settings.py file with an editor of your choice. Especially important are the OAuth credentials: There, you'll need to enter your keys & secrets for the TypePad API, which you can get here: http://www.typepad.com/account/access/api_key

Finally, get the database Motion uses set up: python manage.py syncdb

That's it. Now you can get your development server running again, using the command above. For more docs, developer.typepad.com is usually a good place to look, for example when it comes to customizing your Motion instance. Have fun!

This test day will focus on Sugar Labs' Sugar on a Stick, a downstream project based on Fedora.

Sugar on a Stick has launched it's first version codenamed "Strawberry" successfully in June and has recently announced the beta release of its next version. It contains basically a slightly modified version of the Sugar Desktop on a Fedora System, prepared to be deployed on USB keys.

The test cases have been developed with the goal in mind to be of value for both projects, Sugar Labs and the Fedora Project. The latter one will especially profit from a better integration of the aforementioned desktop, as well as the testing of the LiveUSB technology. Additionally, new features like the rebootless live installer, which has been discussed before (and been included in Fedora lately) are also ready for testing.

We invite you to jump in #fedora-test-day tomorrow, September 3, and to join the fun! More concrete information can be found in the wiki: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Test_Day:2009-09-03_SoaS

"Thanks for joining us on this Tuesday evening!" --Chris Martin

 Well, it was an awesome Tuesday evening. Coldplay was rocking the stadium of Hannover, where I went to see their show. It was just an impressive show, containing everything from Fix You to Viva La Vida and Yellow.

 So seriously, if you should get the chance to see them live, make sure to use it! Below are some pictures, too...

See the full gallery on posterous

Posted via email from sdziallas's posterous

Entering my last year in high school here in Germany, I guess it's time to think about a college for the time after school. I've been working on the Fedora Education SIG with the goal to create a development environment for students and teachers (here's the first version, btw), to allow them to jump easily on the train of contributing to open source projects. And I'd love to continue to do so.

Any recommendations college-wise?