Release notes/12.1.0

NOTE: The contents of this page are not set in stone, and are subject to change! This page is a draft in active flux ... Please leave suggestions on the talk page.

VERY EARLY DRAFT!

Purpose

OLPC OS 12.1.0 is a new software release focusing on improving the XO-1.75 user experience, and undertaking a much-needed technological shift for Sugar's internals from to GTK+ 3.x. Additionally, XO-1.5 and XO-1 continue to be supported in this release, and we include a variety of new features and fixes.

Features

Sugar-0.96

GTK3

In recent years, the GNOME platform (which provides the basis on top of which Sugar is built) has been in transition from GTK+ 2.x to GTK+ 3.x. This has had some impacts on Sugar, which uses GTK+ 2.x only. During this development cycle, we have spearheaded efforts within the Sugar Labs community to make Sugar GTK3-ready and to move the recently-broken components over to GTK3.

Despite being a large chunk of work and very important for the future of Sugar, the changes you will see as a user are few. This work was limited to the back-end platform only. As we continue the transition in future, you'll receive efficiency improvements, and activities will improve in quality from having more direct access to a wider range of system libraries.

Write to the journal anytime

Recent Sugar versions have shown a "naming screen" upon stopping a new instance of a Sugar activity. The idea was to encourage the learner to provide a good name for their work, and perform some self-reflection in the details field. However, some found this confusing (stopping an activity should be as simple as possible).

Sugar-0.96 changes this - the naming screen is no longer displayed. However, all activities now have a button in the toolbar that allows a description to be set. We hope that this will continue to encourage self-reflection while not being as intrusive as before.

Text to speech

A new icon in the Sugar frame allows for any currently-selected text to be dictated by the internal speech engine.

Notable activity changes

Browse, Wikipedia and Help have been moved from Mozilla to WebKit internally, as the Mozilla engine can no longer be embedded into other applications (like Browse) and have stated officially that it is unsupported. WebKit has proven to be a far superior alternative and this represents a valuable step forward for Sugar's future. As a user you may not notice much new in the web browsing experience, but you may well notice an improvement in performance and startup time.

Wikipedia has been updated with new content, both in English and Spanish.

Memorize and Jukebox have been moved to the new Sugar toolbar design, completing the transition: all standard shipped activities use the new design.

Base system

• Update to Fedora 17, systemd etc.
• new kernel
• ARM moved to hardfp for increased performance

More disk space

• SD card root filesystem automatically grown to fill card

Network improvements

• networks shared between GNOME and Sugar
• networks come up earlier during boot

Miscellaneous improvements

• screen now dimmed when system is inactive, even when automatic PM is disabled
• new boot screen, new customisation methods
• refined olpc-os-builder config format for module selection

Notable fixed bugs

• JFFS2 "the slows" avoided by reserving disk space for root (Trac #5317)
• Fix sisusbvga on XO-1 (Trac #10746) , (Trac #10568)
• Incomplete fs-update may leave laptop bootable (Trac #11776)
• network scan after resume is no longer unreliable/incomplete

Known problems

• no cheese (#11803)
• anything that might use clutter segfaults (#11810) e.g. gnome-control-center