I am in the process of watching the recording of the SkoleLinux Conference and thought it was time for a Sugar[1] status update.
- Foundation
We have spent much of the last several months making Sugar Labs more responsive to the entire Educational community. Sugar Labs in now an independent NGO. OLPC is still our largest user and one of our major contributors. But, Sugar Labs has a independent planning and release cycle. We have established a six month release cycle. After much deliberation, we are in the process of establishing our own trac and git repositories.
- Distribution
Sugar will be include in the upcoming Fedora release as a selectable X-session from the logon menu. We are facing challanges in Ubuntu with a abi-word version mismatch. Sugar will be available from the Ubuntu-Sugartem Personal Package Archive. At this time, we don't know if we will have the abi-word issue worked out. In November, we will be meeting with Mandriva.
-Jabber Server
Sugar uses Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP) for collaboration between desktop. We currently use a modified version of ejabber as our collaboration server. Ejabber is not scaling as well as we hoped. Because, ejabber introduces unnecessary over head, OLPC is working on a new XMPP server called Gadget which scales better.
-LTSP
We still have progress to make within the LTSP community. Fedora has gotten liveCDs to work on 256M computers. So, we are meeting the memory requirements for LTSP. The lack of a XMPP server-in-a-box is blocking Sugar's inclusion in the project.
-SkoleLinux
I hope the above status report gives you an idea of the current status of Sugar Labs and the Sugar platform.
What else should we work on to make it easier for you to include Sugar in SkoleLinux?
thanks
david
1.
www.sugarlabs.org