Sugar on Debian

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Please contribute instructions for getting Sugar to work with Debian GNU/Linux.

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Installing sugar on Debian Unstable

For now Sugar can only be installed on a mix of unstable (SID) and experimental.

Prerequisites

Python 2.5 is installable from Debian testing but, as of 2007 Feb 16, it is "unsupported" in the sense that python modules are not compiled with support for 2.5 by default.

To cause Python 2.5 be supported, you can edit /usr/share/python/debian_defaults.

[DEFAULT]
# the default python version
default-version = python2.4
# all supported python versions
supported-versions = python2.4, python2.5
# formerly supported python versions
old-versions = python2.3
# unsupported versions, including older versions
unsupported-versions = python2.3

Shown above is a copy of my debian_defaults. Yours might look a little different. The important thing is to check where python2.5 is listed.

You may need to change the default python in your $PATH as well:

cd /usr/bin
sudo ln -sf python2.5 python

Recompiling

Before beginning, install tools indicated in debian maint-guide. Also, you need to make sure the experimental source archive is listed in /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb-src http://ftp.debian.org/debian experimental main  #important!

# Also may be required:
deb http://ftp.debian.org/debian testing main contrib non-free
deb http://ftp.debian.org/debian unstable main
deb http://ftp.debian.org/debian experimental main

Now that Python 2.5 is "supported" on your Debian box, you need to recompile any python packages which are required by sugar. An easy way to do this is to use apt-src. For example:

$ mkdir debian   # keep your work somewhere temporary
$ cd debian
$ apt-src install python-dbus
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
Need to get 471kB of source archives.
Get:1 http://ftp.au.debian.org experimental/main dbus-python 0.80.2-1 (dsc) [881B]
Get:2 http://ftp.au.debian.org experimental/main dbus-python 0.80.2-1 (tar) [453kB]
Get:3 http://ftp.au.debian.org experimental/main dbus-python 0.80.2-1 (diff) [16.2kB]
Fetched 471kB in 38s (12.2kB/s)
gpg: Signature made Tue 13 Feb 2007 11:34:43 PM IST using DSA key ID 5BE41F21
gpg: Can't check signature: public key not found
dpkg-source: extracting dbus-python in dbus-python-0.80.2
dpkg-source: unpacking dbus-python_0.80.2.orig.tar.gz
dpkg-source: applying ./dbus-python_0.80.2-1.diff.gz
$ cd dbus-python-0.80.2
$ dpkg-buildpackage -b -uc -rfakeroot    # wait a long time
$ cd ..
$ sudo dpkg -i *.deb

Here is a list (maybe incomplete) of python packages you will need to recompile:

• python-avahi
• python-cairo
• python-dbus
• python-gnome2-desktop
• python-gobject
• python-gtk2

If you neglect to recompile a python package which is indeed required by sugar then hopefully you will get a helpful failure message indicating where you are remiss.

suger-jhbuild

If you had already checked out sugar-jhbuild previously, make sure your copy is up-to-date before building:

cd sugar-jhbuild
git-pull

• Read the instructions Sugar_with_sugar-jhbuild, and also check Sugar
• After building everything, ./sugar-jhbuild run failed because other packages were not installed on The system. The following list should be considered prerequisite to anyone wanting to run sugar on debian unstable.

automake1.7 gtk-doc-tools xnest libtiff-tools libtiff4 libtiff4-dev gconf2 
gconf2-common libgconf2-dev dbus python-dbus avahi-daemon avahi-utils 
avahi-discover python-avahi network-manager-dev network-manager dhcdbd
libnm-* network-manager-gnome

I recovered these packages from my shell history, by searching for 'apt-get install'. Obviously, many of them brought their own dependencies and I probably happened to some important packages installed already, so please feel free to add to this list, or make corrections.

--James Bergstra

Other Links

• Install jhbuild

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