Yesterday was a great day for the Planetarium Deployment in Berlin, Germany. We gave out a USB key containing the Sugar on a Stick (Soas) version Strawberry to every learner in our class!
This is a big milestone in this deployment. The learners have now the possibility to use the Sugar learning platform at home. This will allow them to dig deeper, to discover at their own pace. I am very excited how much this will change the way the learners will use Sugar. I will definitely let you know how we progress!
To make this all happen some work had to be done beforehand. Of course I needed to find some sticks. As not every kid had a stick they could use themselves I looked for a partner to help to the little data storage devices. OLPC Deutschland kindly offered to donate the sticks for the deployment - thanks very much!
Once I had the sticks there was the question which Soas/Sugar version I should put on them. Myself I had used Soas-Strawberry for months now and was really happy with the performance and stability. And as I use Sugar 0.84 in my class too, I decided this was the way to go. I had to fix a few bugs that were introduced by updates (Etoys, Write) and together with Sebastian we worked out an easy way to localize the image. Thanks Sebastian for all your support in those last weeks. I also want to thank the Sugar Labs infrastructure team for providing me with the environment to build the images, and especially Sascha which helped me to setup my login on a, normally lazy, Sunday afternoon.
I want to thank as well all the translators that made the localized Sugar environment possible. This is a great strength of the Sugar platform and the Sugar community which is hard to beat.
Now the learners took the sticks home and the next exciting part is if they will manage to boot them. Unfortunately there are many things that can go wrong. Some machines can not boot from USB directly for example. That issue I have solved by providing the students with boot helper CDs. But even though they have the CD, on some machines you have to set the boot options in the BIOS first. And getting into the BIOS is different on every machine, and even if the device is set in the BIOS on certain machines you still have to hit a key on boot to select the USB device to boot from. And how do you give good instructions to a young learner to make settings in the BIOS? Of course I asked the students to do the setup with their parents, but still I am very excited what the outcome is. For how many will it boot directly? At least I have feedback from one student that it booted right away for him… 
All in all, I think this is a success story, and I hope this encourages the community to keep on working towards their goals and others to make similar experiences to mine.