Recently in OLPC Category

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:

• http://people.sugarlabs.org/sdz/epel-6/i386/
• http://people.sugarlabs.org/sdz/epel-6/SRPMS/

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

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.

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...

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

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! :)

Well, I hope everybody has a good time over the holidays, as I'm a bit late with my "Merry Christmas" post. But nevertheless, this post is about an announcement I should have done a week or so ago.

As some of you may (and some not) have noticed, there's is new version of the Fedora Sugar Spin around. So what's the cool new stuff we're propagating?

• We're now basing the spin on F10 + the latest updates (at the date of composing the image).
• There's a whole bunch of new activities around, just waiting to be tried out. Make sure to give 'em a try!
• An exciting technology called sugar-presence-service has been integrated. It allows a kind of connection between sugar users in their neighborhood view - Greg has an interesting blog post about it here.

You're still not convinced? Well, you might want to have a look at The Coding Studio's screenshot tour (which has been creating some time ago) to get an overview.

So what are you waiting for? You can give it a test drive by getting it from here.

Happy Holidays everybody!

Note: This has also been posted on several mailing lists, like here!

Update: Please be aware of the new location of this spin! See this for further details.

I'm proud to be announce the availability of our Fedora Sugar Spin,
which incorporates the Sugar Desktop Environment on a Fedora Live CD.

So, what is this in specific? With this spin, you'll be able to run
Sugar, which is developed by Sugarlabs and the desktop environment used
on the OLPC, directly from a Live CD! You'll find several activities on
the image including most notably...

• sugar-browse - a web browsing activity based on xulrunner
• sugar-write - a word processor based on abiword
  

...among with several other applications introducing e.g. chat support.

We, the OLPC SIG, will be importing further activities into Fedora,
which might be installed using 'yum install sugar-*' at a later time.

Where can you get it? Easily, here (updated):

   http://alt.fedoraproject.org/pub/alt/olpc/0.82/i686/sugar-spin.iso

Here's the SHA1 checksum, just if you're interested:

f032ab45aa116c2728dcd2d676e29a5ee114fd1d  sugar-spin.iso

And what if you wanted to put it quickly onto your USB Key? Even easier!
You'll just need to grab Luke Macken's liveusb-creator, which already
includes support for the Sugar Spin. Here's the link:

https://fedorahosted.org/releases/l/i/liveusb-creator/liveusb-creator-3.0.zip

Update:
It still contains the old link; we're working on getting this fixed, but until then you'll need to download the image manually from the location above.

Thank you everybody, who made this possible!