Live CD

<< Emulating the XO

A Live CD is a bootable medium which has an operating system that can run upon boot; you don't need to install it to internal storage. It lets you try out Sugar on your current hardware without making any permanent changes. It lets you demonstrate and potentially test your software at a faster speed than Emulation. Whether using a Live CD or Emulation, the Sugar UI will likely be running on a faster computer than the 433MHz XO-1 and will thus execute faster than on the actual laptop.

General instructions

Live CDs are usually distributed as .iso (ISO 9660) images. You download the .iso image and then burn it to a CD-ROM using a program that can create a CD from a file (note that MS Windows XP cannot do this natively, please do not copy an ISO image .iso file to CD — it's not what you want), or copy it to a prepared USB flash drive, or install it on a virtual machine. Then you boot your machine from the CD or USB flash drive, or boot the virtual machine from the image.

In general, Live CDs either take an OLPC or other Sugar build (based on Fedora) and create a Live CD, or take a Linux distribution's Live CD machinery and add Sugar packages to that.

OLPC Live CD

This is based on the OLPC ext3 build image

• Download from ftp://rohrmoser-engineering.de/XO-LiveCD or mirror
  • Earlier builds at http://dev.laptop.org/pub/livebackupcd
• Maintainers: Wolfgang Rohrmoser and Kurt Gramlich
• Description: official OLPC image turned into a Live CD using the LiveBackup framework.
• For more Information see LiveBackup XO-LiveCD
• The project is hosted in git
• Announcements
  • Version 8.2
  • Version 080321
  • Version 080130
  • First version 071206

It is also possible to use this type of Live CD to create a "virtual Sugar lab" for a school, where a traditional computer lab's computers are booted into a Sugar environment, storing their data on a networked or other storage device, without changing the lab's installed software. (How? Link would be appreciated)

Other efforts

Sbuntu

"Sugar for Ubuntu" Live USB. This is a customization of a Ubuntu 8.04.1 Live CD to make it boot into Sugar. For more information see http://dev.laptop.org/~probono/sbuntu/

Sugar-jhbuild Live CD

For recent details, see sugar:Live CD on http://sugarlabs.org.

• Download http://download.sugarlabs.org/sugar/liveimages/debian-jhbuild/
• Maintainer: Guy Sheffer
• Debian-live based
• Building scripts available

Other Sugar Live CDs

See the comprehensive list of "Starch" complete disk images on http://sugarlabs.org.

XUbuntu Gutsy Live CD

• Download: http://startx.ro/sugar/
• Annoucement.
  • further discussion

A XUbuntu Live CD with the Sugar Ubuntu package, with installation capability and launch-from-USB-key. It allows you to run Sugar directly on the hardware with an XUbuntu environment as well. A full working Live CD with a recent build is available.

Fedora Sugar spin

Notes: Sebastian Dziallas reports that there is a Sugar spin based on Fedora available here:

• Download http://alt.fedoraproject.org/pub/alt/olpc/0.82/i686/sugar-spin.iso (new URL)
• Announcement

With this spin, you'll be able to run Sugar, which is developed by Sugarlabs and the desktop environment used on the OLPC, directly from a Live CD! You'll find several activities on the image including most notably...

• sugar-browse - a web browsing activity based on xulrunner
• sugar-write - a word processor based on abiword

...among with several other applications introducing e.g. chat support.

The OLPC SIG, will be importing further activities into Fedora, which might be installed using yum install sugar-* at a later time.

The SHA1 checksum is, if you're interested:

f032ab45aa116c2728dcd2d676e29a5ee114fd1d sugar-spin.iso

What if you wanted to put it quickly onto your USB Key? You'll just need to grab Luke Macken's liveusb-creator, which already includes support for the Sugar Spin. Here's the link:

https://fedorahosted.org/releases/l/i/liveusb-creator/liveusb-creator-3.0.zip

The liveusb-creator still contains the old link, which is the reason why you'll need to download the spin manually until this gets fixed.

Thank you everybody, who made this possible!

Pilgrim Fedora Live CD

A Fedora Pilgrim Live CD with the official image pre-downloaded and configured to run in Qemu with KQemu. Allows you to run the image from the standard Fedora desktop inside an emulator.

See also

• Remastering OLPC livecd. January 15, 2007.
• How to write ISO files to CD on Windows

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