Strawberry

Day 9: Broken Arrow

Karl L OLPC, SUGAR , , , , ,

With the end of week 2 nearing, I thought it would be time to update. The first bit of news is that as of tomorrow, Andy will be away for 2 weeks (hence the title) leaving me all alone to get on with the project; although from the sounds of things I wont be alone for long, as news has come through of a couple more people being interested in the Codex project!

As it stands ill be working alone next week, but if we do have some new recruits we could be looking at up to 4 people working on the project by the end of next month, what a team that would make!

So far the week has mainly been spent in close contact with the developers and generally trying to soak up all the information available (there’s enough of it).

Day 8 (2009.06.24) started with an article from the Online BBC News site: “OLPC software to power aging PCs” which is part of the buzz from the new Sugar On a Stick release “Strawberry” which we tested out today.
The new version is much smoother and loads quicker than the beta version I origionally linked too. This is exciting news as it means Sugar On A Stick is alive and well and will work with a 1GB USB Drive upwards (in size) on very old machines, even those which wont boot from a USB (with the help of a CD you can create).
The new strawberry release includes new activities such as “Physics” which Andy and I had a lot of fun playing with. The SugarLabs website has a host of useful information regarding a number of areas such as getting up and running or downloading new activities.

Today however we managed to get our hands on a university laptop which we have complete access too, meaning we were able to officially format and install Fedora 11 which will be useful in trying to create the development environments needed for Sugar. The Edu Spin I discussed earlier will require Fedora which is the main reason we chose to use it as the laptops instillation, however we still have access (and are using) the multitude of linux distros we have installed on the USB’s lying around from last week.

Having walked into the project not being very adept to using Linux, im slowley starting to make my way around the different distros and getting used to the terminal etc, the terminology for alot linux is what seems to throw me off most, but I guess this must be natural from a born and bread windows user.

Currently we are still waiting on a Kickstart file from one of the developers which should be released soon, meaning we will be able to attempt to compile our own environment based on what we can learn from this, mixed up from last years Live CD; along with this we might be able to get our hands on an early snapshot of the Edu spin and play around with it in order to see how well it will work with the Codex project requirments.

In the mean time I have tried to get what I think is the developers version of Sugar; “Jhbuild” running, which is available from the SugarLabs Git and is also supported by Fedora along with a few other distros; however access to the repository from the labs looks like it might be restricted (Connection refused on clone),  so ill try again using the new laptop from home, hopefully it wont use up all of the little monthly usage we are allowed where I live!

Tomorrow (Friday 2009.06.26) I will probably be spending the day helping Andy move house as he is in limbo at the moment before he shoots off for 2 weeks; however next week I will make a start on the current to do list Andy has posted along with getting my teeth firmly into Python and trying to produce something more than print:”Hello World”. Wish me luck!

Links: