Tag Archives: Open Source

Students can be part of Google Code-in with SugarLabs

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A global, online open source development & outreach contest for pre­-college students ages 13-­17

The Google Code-­in contest gives students around the world an opportunity to explore the world of open source development. Google not only runs open source software throughout our business, we value the way the open source model encourages people to work together on shared goals over the internet.

Give it a try from December 7th, 2015 to January 25th, 2016!

Participants complete “tasks” of their choice for a variety of open source software projects. Students can earn t-­shirts, certificates, and hooded sweatshirts for their work. Each software project will name two students as their grand prize winners and those students win a four day trip to in Mountain View, CA, USA in June 2016.

Since open source development is much more than just computer programming, there are lots of different kinds of tasks to choose from, broken out into five major categories:

1. Code: Writing or refactoring code

2. Documentation/Training: Creating and editing documentation and helping others learn

3. Outreach/Research: Community management and outreach/marketing, or studying problems and recommending solutions

4. Quality Assurance: Testing to ensure code is of high quality

5. User interface: User experience research or user interface design

This year students can work with 14 open source organizations: Apertium, Copyleft Games Group, Drupal, FOSSASIA, Haiku, KDE, MetaBrainz, OpenMRS, RTEMS, SCoRe, Sugar Labs, Systers, Ubuntu, and Wikimedia Foundation.

Over the past five years, over 2200 students from 87 countries completed at least one task in the contest. This year we hope to have even more students participate globally. Please help us spread the word and bring more students into the open source family!

Visit g.co/codein to learn more about the contest. For even more information and contest updates, read our Frequently Asked Questions, follow our blog or join our mailing list.

The Google Code-­in contest starts on December 7, 2015!

 

Lanedo enriches One Laptop per Child’s multitouch experience

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Open source experts from Hamburg improve the devices’ software platform. Code will be available under free license to the worldwide community.

Lanedo, Hamburg-based Open Source firm, is proud to announce their contribution to OLPC’s newest device, named XO-4 touch. The 7.5“ convertible notebook, expected in 2013, focuses on multitouch technology as one of its main features.

Lanedo was involved from the very beginning to extend the OLPC sofware platform called Sugar, enhancing the user interface with touch functionality and therefore laying the foundation for future developments. The team not only improved the X.org graphical subsystem with numerous multitouch-related bug fixes, but also extended the respective functionality of the GTK+ toolkit, used for drawing windows, icons and other UI widgets.

Sugar has been a significant diferentiating factor in the worldwide user community for the XO laptop. We appreciate the support of Lanedo to continue the development and enrichment of the Sugar platform, says Rodrigo Arboleda, CEO of OLPC.

One of the most exciting features is the new intuitive text selector, that allows on-screen selection using handles for exact positioning. Furthermore, several commonly known gestures like zoom, rotate and swipe have been added to the Sugar environment, available throughout the system. Lanedo has also contributed to XO-4’s word processor, based on AbiWord, which not only had the same text selector implemented in native code, but also saw improvements in scrolling and other multitouch functions. Likewise, many other bundled applications have been enhanced.

Martyn Russell, one of Lanedo’s founders and managing director, is excited about the work done: Lanedo is proud to have had the opportunity to engage in such a noble project as One Laptop Per Child. It has been a great experience and we are thrilled at the prospect of contributing to the Open Source based platform in the future.

Following the principles of free sofware, developers can take advantage of those new features in their own projects, as all code writen will be made available freely to the benefit of the worldwide community – the GTK+ enhancements have already been incorporated in the 3.6 releases.