Recently in TOS Category

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:

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.

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!

Changes in Sugar on a Stick since the last release (v.2 Blueberry):

Well, probably not exactly 500 days. But I have been accepted to Google's Summer of Code for Sugar Labs and am really happy to spend my summer starting today working on improving Sugar on a Stick.

Sugar on a Stick will see it's version 3 release code-named Mirabelle tomorrow, jointly with the release of Fedora 13.

And so today mostly consisted of release preparation and last-minute testing of the RC3. I packaged updates for a couple activities, which have been submitted for testing and should be available soon. Please give them a try and either comment in Bodhi or using Easy Karma.

In the meantime, Mel did an overhaul of the main Sugar on a Stick wiki page, which is being turned into a contributor portal for this release.

(picture by Dan Terzian taken from Flickr under a CC-BY-SA license)

Here's a list of the activities that are going to appear in a Sugar Environment near you soon. Please give them a try!

• Paint (F11, F12, F13)
• Turtle Art (F13)
• Labyrinth (F13)
• Pippy (F13)
• Jukebox (F13)
  

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!