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