SugarOnAStick
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Sugar on a Stick hits 3.0, teaches us about a new kind of fruit
Strawberries go great with shortcake. Blueberries? They make one heck of a pie. But, when we learned about the latest release of the Sugar Learning Platform, we had to go look up just what a Mirabelle is. Turns out it's a small, orange plum that really has nothing to do with Sugar's Fedora underpinnings, but certainly sounds healthier than Google's versioning schemes. Mirabelle has just been given the Sugar on a Stick treatment, and as with previous releases this one can be loaded to DVD or thumb drive and booted to give a taste of XO without requiring any repartitioning. Sugar on a Stick is now an official Fedora spin, distributed on the Fedora site in both 32- and 64-bit flavors at the other end of that source link below.
Sugar on a Stick OS goes to 2.0, gets Blueberry coating and creamy Fedora 12 center (video)
It didn't take long for Sugar on a Stick, the OLPC-free version of the Sugar OS, to go from concept to bootable, and it's only taken a few further months to go from that first version, called "Strawberry," to this twice as fruity "Blueberry" flavor. Updates are evolutionary here, with a core built on Fedora 12 and Sugar .86, adding in Gnash for Flash support as well as a suite of new apps. Most notable is the recently released Open Office 4 Kids, a streamlined version of the suite that probably won't be great for squeezing every character of your resume onto one page but should be good enough to spread a 500(ish) word book report over two. There is a number of other updates included, some demonstrated after the break, all available for your download now. You're just 589MB away from sweet OS simplicity.
Oddly humble Negroponte lists OLPC's failures, calls Sugar a 'mistake'
The noble goal of a $100 laptop for developing nations has come to fruition -- but of course at a higher cost and later date than expected. One Laptop Per Child has succeeded in delivering 900,000 XO laptops into the hands of kids, but that's a far cry from the many millions expected and Chairman Nicholas Negroponte is pulling no punches in describing what went wrong. He's still bitter at Intel, claiming it worked to "spoil the market," and angry about many nations cutting back on large deals. But, he isn't just lashing outwardly, calling the custom Linux-based operating system that runs the XO, a "mistake," saying "Sugar should have been an application" of the sort it has now morphed to be with Sugar on a Stick. Too little too late? OLPC has already made massive staff cuts and sales from the Give One, Get One program dropped 90 percent last year. With machines like the EduBook selling for $160 to institutions and able to run common operating systems, we're not seeing the future get any more bright for this little green guy.[Via Slashdot]
Sugar Labs' 'Sugar on a Stick' OS available for any and all
The last time we heard from Sugar Labs, its "Sugar on a Stick" project (a tidied-up build of Sugar OS which can be run live from a CD or USB drive) was just entering beta. Apparently all the company needed to take that version to a release-ready state was a month (give or take). A full, free version of Sugar is now available in a 383MB ISO file for anyone to take advantage of -- though the company is obviously setting its sights firmly in the direction of the education market as usual. The OS -- previously designed for the OLPC XO, but now targeted to any PC or Mac schools have lying around -- is based on the newly released Fedora 11, and is in a "Strawberry" release meant for real world classroom testing. The feedback the company receives on this edition will apparently be incorporated into a future version destined for your hands and eyes at the end of the year. In the meantime, you can take SoaS for a spin... ASAP. [Via Ars Technica]
