In early November Daniel Drake announced the release of OLPC's latest operating system version 11.3.0. It took me a while until I found time to install it on two of my XOs and it was only this past weekend that I really played around with it for several hours. My overall impression is that this is indeed the most polished and enjoyable Sugar-on-XO experience I've ever had.

Browse now supports tabs!

Reading through the 11.3.0 release notes the three most notable improvements from my perspective are:

• inclusion of Sugar 0.94 which among other things brought a search functionality to the Favorites View and made it easier to exchange files and Journal entries between Sugar and GNOME
• the support for tabs in the Browse Activity (yay!)
• the fact that when using collaboration the Neighborhood View now shows the name of the Activity instance ("Today's homework discussion") rather than just the name of the Activity itself ("Chat")

Additionally the new version also provides much improved software support for the upcoming ARM based XO-1.75 though OLPC does point out that for this particular platform 11.3.0 "does not represent the quality of software that will be shipped to deployments".

If you're keen to do a fresh install 11.3.0 on your XO then head over to the installation instructions. If you're thinking of upgrading your XO from a previous version then make sure to closely follow the update steps. Especially XO-1 users should take note of the known problems section and subsequently follow the update preparation instructions.

Congratulations and thanks to everyone involved for their all their efforts to make XOs with Sugar an even better learning platform.