In the previous Sugar post I failed to mention (I did not know) that in order to install, you'll need to have gutsy-updates enabled as PPA packages are built against that. So if sugar was not installable because it required a newer libpango that was the reason.

The original SimCity game, which was recently open sourced and ported to the OLPC platform is now available as sugar-simcity-activity.
It does not blend quite as well into the Sugar UI as the others but it is playable :)

Sharing should work in the chat, connect and memory game activites at least. Not yet in Write, the abiword plugins are not packaged, I have to figure out how to build a package out of two orig.tgz-s as that is how abi2.6 plugins are built.

If you want to see what the software on the XO machines looks like you can install Gutsy packages from my PPA

Install sugar-emulator and sugar-activities, then run sugar-emulator from the command line, and you can try out more or less the same educational software that Generation XO will soon be growing up with :) Even more, you can start collaborating with existing OLPC laptops that are now on the internet, or with others running the emulator. It's not a CPU emulator, the XO has an x86 Geode after all, but it's a nested X session.

You'll get a Xephyr window in which the Sugar environment will start. Use F1 through F4 to change the view modes. In F1 if you're online you'll see others and will be able to chat or play by sharing the respective activities. Alt-q quits the Sugar session.

You can run multiple sessions on the same box in the same time

$SUGAR_PROFILE=pig sugar-emulator
$SUGAR_PROFILE=cow sugar-emulator

then you can try out the collaboration support without a net connection.

About 20 activities are packaged and quite up to date with what is in current upstream git.

If you want to start testing or developing activities, the project's wiki has a good starting page for that.

You don't even need deb packages for an activity to try it out, just take the .xo file and unpack it under ~/Activities and will be picked from there. The .xo file is a zip file with the activity code, data and metadata, similar in concept to Java's jar files or Firefox extension xpi bundles.

The important ones that are lacking from my PPA are: Etoys and TamTam (needs csound python packaged) and the browser activity is unusable because of a xulrunner-1.9 bug in gutsy which has yet to be tracked down, and which makes pyxpcom fail. If someone feels like debugging this, the logviewer activity shows the exact traceback to get started from. Building xulrunner takes over an hour on my laptop and I am not familiar with the mozilla tree so help is appreciated. A build from upstream jhbuild works fine so there is hope for tracking down the patches or config options in ubuntu that create a different binary.

Packages besides Sugar that will be installed are libabiword2.6 and abi python bindings, newer version of telepathy-gabble and telepathy-salut (collaboration uses XMPP - Jabber) . The rest are from the Ubuntu archives.

Enjoy. If enough people are interested in contributing towards improving these and having it all in Hardy repos, we can set up a Sugar/XO group in LP for it or find some way we can work together.

To celebrate the new releases of Ubuntu and of its local derivative, Kiwi Linux [1], last Saturday our LUG held a presentation for students and other interested people at the Technical University in Cluj. The talks covered Ubuntu 7.10, Kiwi 7.10, OLPC, Launchpad usage and community involvment. With about 50 attendees it was the liveliest and most successful of our events to date. Ubuntu is steadily gaining users here as well :)

Kiwi CDs were given out, the XO laptop shown around and the students were encouraged to join the local community and to try picking uni assignments that can be done only using free software, in which case we'll help them on the way.

Pictures from the event

[1] yes, misleadingly named in hindsight, but besides Romanian and Hungarian it still supports English, so it is suited for New Zealand as well

This post will summarize the changes in Xubuntu development and community in the past months

A change in policy resulted in the inclusion of useful GNOME and Ubuntu apps and removing less mature or unmaintained lighter ones.

Our original rules for no libgnome-using apps were meant to keep the distro light. The hope held two years ago that viable GTK-only alternatives for Ubuntu apps would emerge and mature faded. Projects under the Xfce umbrella and to a certain extent Xfce itself are stagnating or moving very slowly, so we had to eventually pick the less lightweight apps because they were more user friendly and less buggy.

Another change that made our continual duplication of efforts even less worthwhile was the resource increase of the Ubuntu base system and of the other apps not directly under Xubuntu control but still included in the distro: python scripts for HP being started by default and firefox being what it is when it comes to memory consumption are two examples.

While not high on most of GNOME developers' agenda, some are working on or are open to patches slimming down their apps and getting rid of libgnome and the ~25 .so-s that it depends on. Incidentally during Gutsy I sent no patch to Xfce upstream but sent a few to GNOME and will probably keep it this way. Avoiding duplication is a good thing when possible, and the only really non-replaceable and good quality apps in Xubuntu are the components of the core Xfce desktop. Everything else is fair game for changing.

The list of Gutsy changes in the Xubuntu default install are: the addition of network-manager, update notifier, displayconfig-gtk, replacing xarchiver, xfburn, gxine and xscreensaver with file-roller, brasero, totem-xine and gnome-screensaver. We also added gnome-games :)

Regarding installation from liveCD, during the past cycles that become impossible on machines with less than 192M RAM. The new (hidden, not in the boot menu) "only-ubiquity" kernel parameter on the Ubuntu liveCDs may help, since it does not start a full desktop opnly the installer.

* On the community side

Lionel Le Folgoc became the most active packager and bugfixer, taking care of the inclusion of Xfce 4.4.1 and many other packages

I did mostly upstream gnome work, some parts of which made it into gutsy, and packaging and bugfixing stuff with the release looming near. This is my last Xubuntu cycle, I am going to take a break from it, seems in good shape, and I have a lot less time these days.

Luzi Thöny did most of the documentation and updated the desktop guide for 7.10

Jozsef Mak took care of the artwork as usual, this time it was done very early in the cycle

Jérôme Guelfucci and others contributed a lot to bug triaging

the Mythbuntu project is now based on Xfce/Xubuntu - this means more exposure and developers for the same set of packages. Hopefully Mario Limonciello and his team will help Xubuntu as well, even if indirectly :)

In the footnotes of a recent post Luis Villa says

"fedora makes it very easy to turn a liveCD iso into a USB key (one command line); Ubuntu’s equivalent process is poorly documented and awkward, which is why I haven’t bothered to test a new Ubuntu Tribe as well"

I also found non-VM testing of CD images more convenient when writing them to a 1GB USB stick compared to burning to an actual CD. It's faster to create, does not waste blanks or wear out CDRW-s and it is noticeably faster to boot (no slow seeks in flash memory).

I modified the Fedora script to work with the Ubuntu liveCD layout and put it here

You'll need to run it on an unmounted vfat formatted partition, for ex:
$ sudo ./isotostick.sh /path/to/image.iso /dev/sdb1

It should work on all ubuntu variants since they use the same liveCD layout.