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

Get sugar-jhbuild

aptitude install git-core

Get sugar-jhbuild through git as described in Sugar with sugar-jhbuild.

Run sugar-jhbuild

cd sugar-jhbuild
./sugar-jhbuild update
./sugar-jhbuild build

If update fails with:

ImportError: No Module name ctypes

Try running

aptitude install python-ctypes

Plenty of dependencies are likely to fail.

For build-base, you should need:

aptitude install libtool libsqlite3-dev libnspr4-dev docbook-xsl intltool

Now, this is ALL you need if you want to spend many hours compiling many packages:

The Dependencies

Debian Sugar build dependencies

You have two ways to get the dependencies: Build-base and building/installing packages manually from experimental archives.

Alternative 1: Build Base

This is easy, but it takes a long time and builds custom versions of all the dependencies (rather than getting them through apt).

./sugar-jhbuild build-base

This takes a long time, but will work. After that, do 'build' and 'run'.

Alternative 2: Get packages from Experimental

If you don't want to compile everything, add the experimental repository to your /etc/apt/sources.list.

There are some packages that can be installed from unstable:

aptitude install darcs libdbus-1-dev libenchant-dev libfribidi-dev libgconf2-dev libgsf-1-dev 
libgstreamer-plugins-base0.10-dev libxslt1-dev libxul-dev python-avahi python-cairo-dev xserver-xephyr xulrunner

But we're still missing python2.5 and some python2.5 modules that need separate compilation.

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 = python2.5
# 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 also need to change the default python in your $PATH as well (unfortunate, but it's currently how the dependency checker in Sugar works):

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

Python Modules in 2.5

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:

• avahi
• dbus-python
• gnome-python-desktop
• gnome-python-extras
• gnome-python
• pycairo
• pycurl
• pygobject
• pygtk
• pyorbit
• python-pysqlite
• python-xml

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.

Debian-OLPC

• Now there is an debian-olpc project alioth debian-olpc

• You can join the mail lists

External links

Documentation in Spanish

See also Installing Debian as an upgrade

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