sdziallas talks

There's a new home for Etherpad packages.

By Sebastian Dziallas on July 31, 2010 2:00 AM | No Comments | No TrackBacks

So Mike McGrath announced repos.fedorapeople.org. Pretty cool, right? I updated the Etherpad packages for F13 and moved them there. Want to try them out? Awesome. Follow this quick guide:

become root and switch to the /etc/yum.repos.d directory
execute wget http://repos.fedorapeople.org/repos/sdz/etherpad/fedora-etherpad.repo
call yum install etherpad and install it together with its dependencies
switch back to your home directory
start the mysql server by running service mysqld start
prepopulate the database by executing etherpad-setup-mysql-db.sh
and now it's time to start the server: etherpad-run-local.sh

That should get you an Etherpad instance running on port 9000. Let me know how it goes. Also, for some strange reason, the Koji scratch composes don't seem to run through, while they do on my local machines. If you're interested in helping out to get this packaged properly, check out the page for the FAD we're tying to organize around Etherpad (https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Etherpad_FAD) or ping me on IRC. I'm sdziallas there.

A whole bunch of Sugar Activity Updates is coming...

By Sebastian Dziallas on July 31, 2010 1:20 AM | No Comments | No TrackBacks

...to an F13 installation near you. Soon. We need a little feedback from you, though. Specifically for the following ativities.

Since they haven't been pushed to the testing repository, yet, you can grab the builds from Koji (the links are on each update's page) or wait a few days and then run yum --enablerepo=updates-testing sugar-*. We're particularily interested whether #1900 is fixed for you with the latest Read update and whether the other activities still perform as they should.

Summer of Code: Moar Newz.

By Sebastian Dziallas on July 27, 2010 1:16 PM | No Comments | No TrackBacks

I've been a little calm in terms of blogging about GSoC lately, since I'm getting ready for my move to the US. There are a couple of things I've been working on lately after pushing the sugar-smolt code upstream, though.

One of the major obstacles for the user in terms of creating Sugar on a Stick - and we have received reports about this - is that the instructions are either outdated or confused and the interfaces very wildly between different platforms and distributions. We've started addressing the first by working on a Creation Kit for SoaS v3. This doesn't mean all is shiny now, but we're getting there. We've recommended Fedora's LiveUSB Creator over the past release cycles when possible and would to continue to build on that. Hence, I've been trying to make it easier for users of other distributions to use the LiveUSB Creator. While I haven't had much success, yet, this is something I'd like to keep an eye on.
I've been working with Peter Robinson on getting Sugar into EPEL. We've gotten a large chunk of packages built already in the appropriate branch. Watch out for announcements coming your way.
Lucian, who's also doing a GSoC at Sugar Labs and working on porting Browse to Webkit (the result being Surf), has fixed one of the major regressions that affected SoaS v3. The Read activity didn't work due to upstream changes in evince's python bindings (#1900). However, thanks to this work, I've been able to take a new activity bundle, package it, and push it as an update to F13. It's currently in testing, so if you do get a minute, please comment on the update.

Sugar Smolt is now in... Smolt!

By Sebastian Dziallas on July 10, 2010 6:00 PM | No Comments | No TrackBacks

I've been working on a Sugar GUI for Smolt as part of my GSoC. Thanks to Mike McGrath, this code is now part of smolt's next branch in GIT. I'm pretty well on schedule with that, given that next week, midterms are happening. You can either check the code out yourself already or wait for a new release coming out. We're also looking forward to including this code in the next iteration of Sugar on a Stick, where it'll help users to submit their hardware profiles more easily.

Thank you, folks.

By Sebastian Dziallas on July 4, 2010 12:35 PM | 1 Comment | No TrackBacks

I'm going to Olin. It's the place I want to go to. I didn't imagine this to happen, but apparently, sometimes everything in the universe aligns and a lot of magic happens.

A close friend of mine once said, that sometimes, no matter how many more words one strings together, one can't get any closer to the true sentiment. He's right. So thank you, folks, for being there and making this happen. This is totally awesome.

Summer of Code: Sugar Smolt!

By Sebastian Dziallas on June 27, 2010 9:45 PM | No Comments | No TrackBacks

I mentioned earlier that I was working on integrating Smolt into Sugar. That's still the case. However, there's now a repository and a ticket for that. And there's a real screenshot. Yez. Rly!

LinuxTag: Recap!

By Sebastian Dziallas on June 20, 2010 10:57 PM | 1 Comment | No TrackBacks

Looks like I'm a little late at catching up with my backlog. Oh well.

I attended LinuxTag earlier this June (thanks Simon for hosting me!) and had the chance to meet and catch up with a lot of folks I hadn't seen in a while. Sugar Labs also had a booth there and it was really good to see people (especially kids) playing with Sugar. Most popular activities included Maze, Physics and Speak. However, also Walter's new Abacus activity quickly gained interest.

I also learned that waking up three hours late (when having a talk scheduled in the morning) is probably not the best of all ideas -- probably unless you ask the cab driver. Got there in time, though and gave my talk on Leveraging Communities.

Sugar Labs also announced Sugar on a Stick v.3 (Mirabelle) widely at LinuxTag. Shameless plug goes here. Was a good time.

LinuxCon: Education Summit

By Sebastian Dziallas on June 8, 2010 7:53 PM | No Comments | No TrackBacks

LinuxCon is happening later this year in August in Boston. We're going to run to an education mini-summit there on August 9. Are you interested in the latest updates on what Teaching Open Source, Sugar Labs and others are doing and would like to meet the people behind the projects in person or just get involved? Drop by and wave!

All interested people, especially those who're from the education sector but new to open source, are welcome: go ahead and add yourself to the wiki! (http://teachingopensource.org/index.php/LinuxCon_2010_Participants)

More details and the scope of the summit live here. We're also still looking for speakers! If you're interested in presenting a project or idea of yours, please email us! The main wiki page (http://teachingopensource.org/index.php/LinuxCon_2010) has more information on that.

Looking forward to seeing you in Boston!

Sugar and EL-6: It Is Real.

By Sebastian Dziallas on June 5, 2010 3:52 PM | No Comments | No TrackBacks

As you may know, Sugar runs on the RHEL 6 Beta. I went ahead and did an actual compose using Smock together with an updated config file for EPEL-6. The results live here and it should be possible to use them directly as a yum repo:

It's also worth noting that work is going on to make this actually happen in EPEL (kudos to Peter Robinson and others too).

500 Days of Summer: Week 1 & 2

By Sebastian Dziallas on June 4, 2010 4:52 PM | No Comments | No TrackBacks

GSoC has started and I'm working on improving Sugar on a Stick, as previously noted. We've just released Mirabelle (which you can download here and has a contributor portal now), so that a good chunk of time went into release preparations and a release recap. I also worked on creating a remix for the upcoming POSSEs.

However, one of the things I'm going to work on for Sugar Labs is the integration of Smolt into Sugar, for example allowing users to contribute to issue reports by attaching their hardware information easily. Here's a mockup of how it might possibly look like. More coming soon!