For those wondering about the operating system for this year's Give One Get One, I am happy to report we are now one step away from final confirmation that Sugar Release 8.2.0 will be the winner, according to this week's Current Events:
Starting October 13, all G1G1v2 XOs will be manufactured with release 8.2. The image needs to pass the final Quanta tests next week. If no issues arise, the release is final. Congratulations and thanks to everyone who worked so hard to make this happen! Release party plans are in the works.If you cannot make the party, you can still help with the 8.2.x release effort by becoming an OLPC friend in testing with your XO. There you can help test the Sugar OS and activities from the comfort of your own XO-1. Oh and don't be shy. There is still much work to do and Greg Smith is already started release planning for 8.2.1.
a mere technicality: Sugar is _not_ an operating system, it's a _user_interface_.
You can run Sugar on many operating systems, it still is the same Sugar "look and feel" for the user, and thus you can learn about it, test it and much more on many computers besides the XO. I have enjoyed Sugar-on-a-stick (USB flash live) that runs on top of Ubuntu for a desktop PC, where you don't even notice it's Ubuntu underneath.
Currently XO Sugar runs on top of Fedora 8, Sugar 8.2.0 on XOs is announced to run on Fedora 9.
The nuance between operating system and user interface has some importance because it means you are not limited to the XO, you are not limited to Fedora to use Sugar, thus Sugar clearly is _not_ a laptop project...
The version numbers are causing no end of confusion.
The OLPC release is called 8.2.0, where the 8 means 2008 and the 2 means the second major release. 8.1.0 was the release formerly called Update.1.
8.2.1 will be a minor bugfix release, and there may be further 8.2.x releases even after 2008 is finished, as and when high priority issues are fixed.
The operating system release 8.2.0 includes Sugar 0.82, where the 8s and 2s are unrelated. Sugar 0.81.x releases were the development "unstable" releases leading to 0.82.0, the first stable release of Sugar in this cycle. Since then there have been further 0.82.x stable releases of various components of Sugar.
8.1.0, aka Update.1 aka build 703, and the minor 8.1.x releases following it (build 708, 711) were based on Fedora 7. There will probably still be an 8.1.3 coming - the reason is that it is easier for deployments to upgrade to a build that is almost exactly the same but with one or two fixes, than to upgrade to a whole new major release.
8.2.0 is based on Fedora 9.
At this point, OLPC is beginning work on what will become OLPC 9.1.0, which will (probably) include Sugar 0.84, which will be a stable release of Sugar following a set of 0.83.x development milestone releases.
Sugar development roadmap: http://sugarlabs.org/go/ReleaseTeam/Roadmap
OLPC future releases: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Future_releases
Yama, I'd argue that Sugar is more than "just" the user-interface, e.g. the collaboration features which go beyond what's normally considered the UI. Also, Sugar, as in the UI, may be available on many platforms at the moment but the collaboration features are still known to cause a bunch of issues when used with the Live-CDs, etc.
Morgan, thanks for the clarification, it's really easy to get lost in the different numbering and naming schemes... May I suggest the following solution which strikes me as much easier:
8.1 => Sugar 2008
8.2 => Sugar 2008 2nd Edition
XS 0.5 could also renamed to School Server 2008 or something...
;-)
hey ChristophD
it's that Right now to get the School Server you need to make an activity. and that undermines a lot of small Xo-1 user groups (Luckily we have Nortel In dc)
I've spent over 2 months of spare time (averaging several hours per day) as a "Friend in Testing" leading up to the 8.2.0 release. It's almost an addiction, but with no negative effects that I can detect, aside from neglected housekeeping chores.
In early August I started testing joyride-2301, then migrated to each following candidate release as it was announced at wiki.laptop.org. I found a few bugs, and dutifully reported them in the Trac bug reporting system at dev.laptop.org. Many of those bugs have been fixed by the development team, so I have watched the XO software get better and better with a certain amount of personal satisfaction. The current release candidate, build 8.2-767 is very much improved over the original G1G1 XO software.
Surfing the Trac bug database, and the OLPC Wiki, have been quite educational, and has provided me a glimpse of the enormous amount of work that has been done already by everyone involved. Modern software development projects are quite enormous and complicated. I did a wee bit of software development over 20 years ago, but that was ultra simple compared to what happens nowadays.
I've spent over 2 months of spare time (averaging several hours per day) as a "Friend in Testing" leading up to the 8.2.0 release. It's almost an addiction, but with no negative effects that I can detect, aside from neglected housekeeping chores.
In early August I started testing joyride-2301, then migrated to each following candidate release as it was announced at wiki.laptop.org. I found a few bugs, and dutifully reported them in the Trac bug reporting system at dev.laptop.org. Many of those bugs have been fixed by the development team, so I have watched the XO software get better and better with a certain amount of personal satisfaction. The current release candidate, build 8.2-767 is very much improved over the original G1G1 XO software.
Surfing the Trac bug database, and the OLPC Wiki, have been quite educational, and has provided me a glimpse of the enormous amount of work that has been done already by everyone involved. Modern software development projects are quite enormous and complicated. I did a wee bit of software development over 20 years ago, but that was ultra simple compared to what happens nowadays.
Good news! So when will the "Latest Releases" box on the wiki be updated to reflect that 8.2.0 is no longer a RC?
Hello,
My Opera can not be changed from its initial settings or my cookies saved.
My Sonata does not work now.
My Twinkle voip client does not work now.
You can run Sugar 8.2.0 easily in the QEMU emulator and either http://sites.google.com/site/olpcqemu/ or http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Emulating_the_XO/Quick_Start/Windows
provide instructions to quickly get started with QEMU under Windows.
G1G1 XO's are NOT shipping with 8.2.0 - according to the OLPC News Forum post, they're coming with build 708, aka 8.1 How did that happen?
Forum Post: http://olpcnews.com/forum/index.php?topic=4017.msg27178