Recently in OLPC Category

Moving On.

By Sebastian Dziallas on December 15, 2010 7:58 AM | No Comments | No TrackBacks
Moving On
"Moving on" -- picture by .craig taken from Flickr, licensed under a CC-BY-NC-ND license.

The Short Version: As many of you might have noticed, my activities within Sugar Labs have been fading lately. I'd like to take the only responsible step and hand my responsibilities off.

The Long Version: I didn't expect to see myself writing this email. I'm currently a student at Olin working really hard to make it through finals and at the same time fighting RSI and dealing with other things (http://sdziallas.com/blog/sebastian/2010/11/a-kid-in-the-candy-store.html). But I also feel that I've been dragging this e-mail out way too long. I'm sorry. Nevertheless, I'm proud of what we accomplished over the past years.

I have great memories from the initial release of Sugar on a Stick at LinuxTag (http://sdziallas.com/blog/sebastian/2009/06/strawberries-for-everyone-now.html) and I still smile when I think of how we recovered from the ridiculous unsustainability of the second release (http://opensource.com/education/09/12/tasty-blueberry) and eventually even made the third release as a team together (http://sdziallas.com/blog/sebastian/2010/05/mirabelles-they-are-there.html). Looking back, I found myself skimming old wiki pages and blog posts (http://blog.melchua.com/2010/06/04/the-history-of-the-soas-mirabelle-release-learning-from-the-past/).

I'm particularly thankful for the experiences I had and the people I met. However, I feel that it's time to move on. I'll be unsubscribing from a couple of mailing lists, but I'll continue to work on bridging open source and education on various levels and I'm always open to direct email. Just a ping away. Email this address.

For Sugar on a Stick, Peter Robinson has alreading been leading the effort up to the latest Mango Lassi release of Sugar on a Stick and done an incredible work over the past year, leaving me confident that everything was taken care of when I had to focus on my studies (both in Germany and the US). I know from personal experience that taking on this work isn't an easy task and I don't want to assume that you're just going to continue doing it infinitely. It is your call. But you've done a great job. Thanks, Peter!

Good luck Sugar Labs. You've come a long way. Don't lose track of your mission.

Dear Intarwebz: Can Haz Teh Data?

By Sebastian Dziallas on September 12, 2010 6:23 AM | 1 Comment | No TrackBacks
So, as some of you my know, I'm as a couple of days ago a freshman at Olin College in Boston. One of the classes I'm taking there is called Modelling and Control of the Physical World, or ModSim for short. It's a great class. Actually, the professor who wrote Think Python, an open source text book on learning Python, is teaching it.

We've just been given our first project. As part of that, we're working in teams of two. My project concerns the development of primary education in developing countries (there's a project description out here, look at the first case). 

We've already been looking at the Education Policy and Data Center's website; however, I was hoping to find further data. We are looking at a variety of countries right now, as we're writing our own project description. Notable examples include Nepal and Pakistan.

We are looking for data that would help us model "the demographics of primary education in developing countries, and the challenges associated with achieving universal primary education by 2015." So statistics on schooling numbers, population and age ranges, drop out and graduation rates, ratio of funds spent on education, pupil/teacher ratio and that sort of thing would be very helpful.

Note that this is a little time-sensitive. We don't have to finish our project until October, but we have close interim deadlines coming up - so if somebody runs into some data over the weekend, this would be greatly appreciated!

Also let me know how you would like to be cited in my project so that I can properly credit and thank you for helping me find data!

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).

Fedora Classroom: Sugar Packaging

By Sebastian Dziallas on January 5, 2010 12:22 AM | No Comments | No TrackBacks
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!

Thinking of contributing to Sugar?

By Sebastian Dziallas on December 30, 2009 1:30 PM | No Comments
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.

SoaS v2 Beta Release - "The Next Big Thing"

By Sebastian Dziallas on August 30, 2009 12:00 AM | No Comments | No TrackBacks
Here we go! I'm pleased to announce the availability of the Sugar on a Stick v2 Beta Release. This release includes already a preview of the features of the upcoming final release, which is due to November 24 right now.
Major updates have been applied and we are now shipping the Fedora 12 Alpha base system as well as the latest Sugar 0.85.3 release. Additionally, we are now shipping the zyx-liveinstalller by default.

Please download and test your version of this release from here:

http://download.sugarlabs.org/soas/releases/soas-2-beta.iso

6b2a235251d545013c020ded05a8336eceff8114 soas-2-beta.iso

When placing the image on your USB key, please use either liveusb-creator for Windows or livecd-iso-to-disk for Linux. We are also providing an appliance image for use with VirtualBox, as well as VMware, to allow even Mac users to test Sugar on a Stick. Later in the development cycle, SoaS will also feature specific images the XO.

Finally, please note also that we are going to have a test day on SoaS together with Fedora QA this Thursday (September 3). Let us know how it goes! In case you encounter any issues, please report them at our bug tracker: https://launchpad.net/soas

the way we walk: linuxtag & fudcon

By Sebastian Dziallas on June 30, 2009 12:00 AM | 1 Comment | No TrackBacks
Day 1. Arrival. LinuxTag. FUDPub.
So there I went. Having celebrated a friends birthday the night before, I was rather tired when taking the train to Berlin. In the end, I arrived there at 10:30 am. After checking in at the hotel, I met Mathieu Bridon. Actually, that was a pretty good accident, as we two were wandering through the city of Berlin then, trying to find a way to the trade fair. In the end, we arrived at hall 7. Later, than originally expected, but we arrived.
It was great to meet all the Sugar folks - some of them I had already met a FOSDEM - again and so I spent most of the time at the Sugar booth. Later this evening, we all went to FUDPub, an event happening at en passent. Mo has some more coverage here... errr? Here!

Day 2. talks, talks and still more talks.
After a rather short night, back to LinuxTag again. Went there with Thorsten Leemhuis and some other folks. Attended Paul's keynote at FUDCon and moved after spending some time with the Fedora people on to more talks. Greg was giving an impressive talk on education and open source. Basically, there's still a lot of work to be done to spread open education. Better get started now. In the evening, Simon gave a talk showcasing Sugar, its concepts and features. He did an awesome job introducing Sugar itself, even to new users.
That night, we all went to a BBQ at c-base hosted by the Ubuntu folks. Just sitting there, talking and enjoying the time was great. We had a bunch of ideas, which were to be discussed deeply the next day.
Day 3. Hackfest. Departure.
10:00 am meeting at FUDCon. Some people were late, some weren't. We went searching a room and finally got one. And so there were Fedora and Sugar folks and the same room, discussing how to improve Sugar.
In the end, it was a very productive meeting: we set the course for the upcoming Sugar and Sugar on a Stick releases - great work everyone! :) More information to follow soonish. Eventually, in the evening, some of us went having dinner together, before I took the train back home.
Did I already say it was awesome? It was. Looking forward to meeting all of you again. For now on IRC. Then later in real life.

Show Must Go On - SoaS for the XO-1

By Sebastian Dziallas on June 17, 2009 12:00 AM | No Comments | No TrackBacks

It's about time: You can now get a special SoaS version for your XO-1! That's cool, right? It basically means that you can now enjoy the coolest Sugar bits on a F11 base system, while stuff like power management is working again.

Well, where's the catch? It's still a preview. An early preview. So it might have some issues (please read this). And to install it, it will overwrite the XO's flash. So you should probably move important data elsewhere.

But wait, installing it - how does this work?

You'll need to grab (and put on your USB key or SD card) these two files:

http://download.sugarlabs.org/soas/xoimages/devxo-1.crc
http://download.sugarlabs.org/soas/xoimages/devxo-1.img

Done? Great! What's next? Just plug that in your XO and press escape before it boots. Then type in either copy-nand u:\devxo-1.img or copy-nand sd:\devxo-1.img, depending on whether you used a key or a card. That's it. It will copy the new image to the NAND and once it's finished, you can already boot it. Note that you'll obviously need to have OLPC's latest firmware and an unlocked XO for that.

So, please give this a try and let us know what you think! Fedora's OLPC mailing list, but also Sugar Labs' Devel list might be a good guess for that...

Get it now - Sugar on a Stick

By Sebastian Dziallas on April 22, 2009 12:00 AM | No Comments | No TrackBacks

The word is out. We've recently announced the availability of our first beta release of SoaS! Now here's the press release. And the release notes.

I'm really happy with how everything evolved during the development cycle and wanted to thank all the people, who did the great work to make this possible!

You know, it's still a beta. It might have some rough edges, but we also need all your help to test it. So after you downloaded it, please give it a try and e-mail us with your thoughts. A good place to direct feedback to is for example our IAEP mailing list.

Finally, this is the direct link: http://download.sugarlabs.org/soas/releases/soas-beta.iso

Please Help: Updating Sugar Packages

By Sebastian Dziallas on March 3, 2009 12:00 AM | No Comments | No TrackBacks

Sugar 0.84 is scheduled for release today. Cool stuff, right? Now what we'd like to do is to to provide a stable version of Sugar on a Stick with all the latest activities and modules as soon as possible. But for that, we need your help:

Please go ahead and have your packages included, updated and built in Koji for F11 by this FRIDAY (2009/03/06)!
We've a table comparing the current versions with the ones in Fedora ready (while with the upcoming release, it might still need to be updated, though): http://sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_on_a_Stick/Roadmap

Please make sure that the information on this page is accurate, too. Finally, if you've any suggestion for a honey activity, which we should definitely include, just add it to the wishlist there!

Thanks in advance for your help and lets make this a great release! :)

« Olin | Main Index | Archives | Pictures »

Search

About this Archive

This page is an archive of recent entries in the OLPC category.

Olin is the previous category.

Pictures is the next category.

Find recent content on the main index or look in the archives to find all content.