I’d like to announce Sugar on a Stick 7 (Quandong)
There’s been a lot of work go into this release from a lot of communities from Fedora and all the Fedora 17 features that give us new and exciting hardware support to the Sugar Labs community and all the new features that come with the Sugar 0.96 release on which SoaS v7 is based.
Thanks go to all the people that have contributed to this release including Kalpa and Thomas who helped directly with SoaS, the Sugar development team and other Sugar developers. A lot of work has been done to ensure we can get working core Activities like Read and Browse work well. While those Activities look simple there’s been a lot of work from a lot of people to support GTK3 and gobject-introspection bindings, a lot of bugs were fixed with upstream packages to make it all work nicely. The few GTK3 Activities are just the beginning of a long road to convert the entire Sugar interface to newer technologies.
Some of the key new features of this release include:
- Based on Fedora 17 and it’s new features
- Massively improved x86 Mac support
- Sugar 0.96 with initial support for GTK3 Activities and many other improvements
- Return of Browse, now based on WebKit
- The long awaited return of Read and inclusion of GetBooks
- Enhanced hardware support with the 3.3 kernel
- An increase in default Activities by nearly 50%
Almost all of the previous Activities have seen updated releases including but not limited to:
- Abacus 35 (GTK3)
- Record 95
- Physics 9
- TurtleArt 138
Newly added Activities include:
- Browse 137 (GTK3)
- Countries 33
- Finance 7
- GetBooks 11
- Help 14 (GTK3)
- Infoslicer 14
- Labyrinth 12
- Paint 43
- Portfolio 21
- Read 99 (GTK3)
There are many more Activities available through the usual Fedora repositories.
There’s a good getting started guide for Activity developers who wish to work with Fedora 17. It is a step by step guide to getting sugar and the development environment configured to enable a quick head start on development.
The release name, Quandong, continues the tradition of naming releases by types of fruit. The Quandong, or Native Peach, is a native Australian bushfood.
You can download the release from the following link.
http://spins.fedoraproject.org/soas/
It can also be installed as part of a standard Fedora 17 install and is shipped as part of the official Fedora installer DVD and the Fedora Multi Spin Live DVD. It can also be installed from the GUI package tool within a running Fedora install or by command line “sudo yum install @sugar-desktop”.