Sugar

  This page is monitored by the OLPC team.

Development of Sugar takes place at Sugar Labs.

Sugar is the core of the OLPC Human Interface. Its goal is to turn the Laptop into a fun, easy to use, social experience that promotes sharing and learning.

The Sugar Home view

Getting Sugar

Sugar is available for many platforms:

on the XO laptop

If you have an XO, it's running Sugar. Read Updating the XO to update to the latest version.

as OS images

You can install or upgrade an XO to a new OS image. You can also run a Sugar image using emulation on almost any operating system, including Windows.

as a bootable CD and USB stick

You can download a Sugar on a Stick image file and burn it to a CD, and then boot and run it on almost any x86 PC, including x86 Macintosh.

as packages for common Linux distributions

You can install Sugar as an alternative desktop on several Linux Distributions.

as runnable source code for developers on Linux

Developers on Linux can install from the latest source code using Jhbuild.

Getting started

You can explore the Sugar interface at the Sugar manual, or in our Getting Started guide.

Note the "Frame key" at the top-right corner of your keyboard, which toggles the presence of the Frame on and off the screen. (The Frame is the black border around the screen that holds the activity taskbar, clipboard, buddy list, etc.)

You can restart Sugar by pressing the Ctrl-Alt-Erase* keys simultaneously.

• (the XO laptop doesn't have a typewriter-esque "Backspace" key, but rather a "Erase" key... which is great for erasing things!)

Develop

Developers, once you've installed Sugar, you can go on to develop for the environment.

Exploring Sugar

• Building the XO: Introducing Sugar - Red Hat Magazine 2007-02-23
• Build from sources
• Read the human interface guidelines
• Get an overview of the architecture
• Write your own activity
• Check out the library of Sugar Code Snippets
• Understanding Sugar code organization
• See a list of Sugar activities and specifications
• Sugar source repository
• The Sugar bug tracker
• Development Team page

Learning More

• Make your own Sugar activities, A published tutorial on developing Sugar activities
• Creating an Activity, General information about how to create an activity
• Activity tutorial, Technical information about how to create an activity
• Activity bundles, Technical information abot how to package an activity
• Sugar Activity Builder, General Script to make a Sugar's activity skeleton
• Hacking Sugar, Tips and tricks

Contribute

• Go to our Getting Involved page.
• Subscribe to the mailing list (here are its archives)
• Join the IRC channel
• Give Sugar some love!
• Test and report issues