Scotty Auble, Development Mentor for the RDC.

This week, the RDC indulged a bit, and spent #rdc2009 Hacker Wednesday tinkering and upgrading our XOs to Sugar 8.2.0. We encountered a bit of difficulty upgrading directly to Sugar 8.2.1, but were successful with an earlier build (767). A couple of the laptops we delivered to the local area were two years old (part of the initial G1G1 campaign) and running the original version of Sugar, so they were definitely due an upgrade.

Two more local laptops were retrieved belonging to local families. Many thanks to Nathan Malamud and Vilma McCutcheon for contributing their laptops to our project. Nathan is our lead beta-tester and videographer for our 2009 summer program. Vilma is an original “Friend of the Rural Design Collective,” and was a Bookmobilista when the Internet Archive BookMobile made its maiden voyage to Oregon in 2007. We have a pretty cool announcement to make relating to that in the next week or so …

And speaking of “Friends of the Rural Design Collective,” we want to welcome Roy Rousseau to the club. Roy has kindly provided us with the funds to purchase our sticks for the Sugar-on-a-Stick part of the project. Thank you, Roy! We will be announcing more friends over the coming weeks.

In other news, Levi is working on the web interface for the IACL-4-OLPC collection (and we are currently brainstorming a better name for our bundle, so consider “IACL-4-OLPC” a code name), while Steven is going the extra mile on the upgrade front, and souping up a couple of the XOs so we can experiment with EPUB. This will require an upgrade to Read 7.0, which was just released this week by Sugar Labs. We can’t wait to give it a whirl!