OLPC OS Changelog

What's new in OLPC OS 11.3.0

• Sugar-0.94:
• Sugar-0.94 is included in the release. This updated version includes various improvements such as more powerful View Source functionality, and easier file exchange between the Journal and the regular filesystem.
• One notable change is that the Keep button has been removed from activities. Many users mistook this with Save, but actually Sugar saves all your work for you - you do not have to tell it do so. The now-removed Keep button's functionality could be better described as duplicate; those who used it with the intention of saving would actually end up with two copies of their work.
• Another noticeable improvement is that the full-screen launching animation for activities has been optimised and is now much less resource hungry than before. In 11.2.0 on XO-1 you may have seen that this launching animation failed to appear or pulse at all; it now comes up without fail and pulses very smoothly, despite the underlying system being very busy loading the activity in question.
• More information is available in the Sugar 0.94 release notes.
• Activities:
• Many activities were reviewed by the Design Team to make the user interface more consistent.
• The Portfolio activity has been added to the default set of activities shipped by OLPC. This activity automatically creates a slide show from Journal entries that have been 'starred'.
• Browse now supports tabs.
• Get Books was improved to provide easier access to book catalogues and classic books.
• Distance can now be used with different units, and new units of measure can be defined by the user.
• XO-1.75 support:
• A great deal of engineering effort has gone into the production of the hardware and software of OLPC's new XO-1.75 laptop. This new laptop model may look and feel the same as previous XOs, but represents a radical change internally: an ARM processor is now used (similar to those found in common mobile phones and tablets). The processor is now included on the same chip as the rest of the core system functionality, taking the definition of System-on-Chip to a new level.
• The XO-1.75 also adds accelerometer hardware, presenting many new opportunities for user interaction with the laptop. For example, see Bert Freudenberg's example of how tilting of the laptop can be used to control a ball's motion in Etoys. Other activities that take advantage of the accelerometer include Turtle Blocks and Fraction Bounce, a game for exploring fractions.
• The XO-1.75 also adds light sensor hardware.
• Many thanks to all OLPC, Sugar and Fedora community members who have helped with development and testing of this new laptop and its software.
• Bug fixes:
• A number of bugs were fixed during this development cycle. The more significant ones include...
• The neighborhood view correctly shows the name of the activity being shared (e.g. "Today's homework discussion") rather than only the name of the activity program (e.g. "Chat") (ticket #10676).
• The Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V Copy/Paste keyboard shortcuts were broken in Paint, TurtleArt and Terminal in 11.2.0. This has now been partially fixed (ticket #10930) but is still faulty in Turtle Art.
• The laptop will now inhibit its auto-suspend functionality while scanning for networks or establishing a connection to a network; this was causing connections to fail (ticket #10366).
• Pressing both mouse buttons at the same time now results in a "middle click" once again (ticket #5835).
• Developer tools such as screen and minicom no longer have problems starting after a reboot (ticket #11078).
• In 11.2.0, the the XO-1.5 keyboard was sometimes unresponsive upon boot into OpenFirmware (only affecting developers who use the Ok prompt). This problem has now been solved (ticket #11021).
• XO-1 stateless mounts now take effect once again (ticket #11120). This fixes the efficient pristine olpc-update mode, and avoids an issue where SSH host keys are regenerated upon upgrade to the previous release (11.2.0).
• The mouse cursor on the Sugar "Name:" screen on 11.2.0 showed an incorrect mouse cursor (ticket #10712); this has been fixed.
• In previous releases, keyboard autorepeat (e.g. the holding of the 'a' which would produce 'aaaaaa' in this mode) was disabled, as it was deemed to be inappropriate for our userbase of first-time computer users. In 11.2.0, autorepeat was unintentionally enabled. It is now disabled again for 11.3.0 (ticket #11175).
• Collaboration: there have been several bug fixes to collaboration not only regression fixes:
• Do not cache the buddy palette in friends tray (SL #3108)
• FileTransfer: handle cancellation cleanly (ticket #11065)
• Invitations: remove item from tray after using the join/decline palette options (SL #3089)
• Joining shared activity: set title for activity palette in frame (SL #3109)