Sugar on Ubuntu

Installation

The easiest way to install Sugar on Ubuntu is to use Sugar-jhbuild. The instructions on this page are for Ubuntu 6.06 "Dapper Drake."

apt-get the prerequisites

You need a number of packages from the Ubuntu repositories. Some of these packages are not available for the stock Ubuntu install, and you may need to enable the universe and multiverse repositories.

 sudo apt-get install build-essential cvs docbook-utils subversion libgtk2.0-dev libidl-dev \
   gnome-common gtk-doc-tools libxt-dev automake1.7 automake1.8 automake1.9 python-gtk2-dev \
   python2.4-avahi git-core cogito python-dev avahi-utils \
   libgconf2-dev xnest libgnome2-dev mozilla-dev libmatchbox-dev python-cairo-dev \
   libtiff4-dev python-gnome2-dev libxdamage-dev libxdamage1 libxcomposite-dev

There may be more packages required; if you find any more, please append them to this list.

Then you must ensure that the Avahi daemon is enabled and running. Execute:

sudo vim /etc/default/avahi-daemon

and ensure the directive "AVAHI_DAEMON_START" is set to 1. Then execute:

/etc/init.d/avahi-daemon start

Using Sugar-jhbuild

Use of Sugar-jhbuild is detailed on building Sugar from sources. To summarize those instructions:

git clone git://dev.laptop.org/sugar-jhbuild
cd sugar-jhbuild
./sugar-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

Troubleshooting

automake version mismatch

During the building task you may get the following error:

error during stage configure of matchbox-window-manager:....[9/12]

This error happens because Ubuntu uses the automake 1.4 version in contrast with matchbox-window-manager which uses the automake 1.9 version. In order to bypass this error you can execute the following command:

sudo update-alternatives --config automake

You will get the following list with the asterisk being at the 1 selection

There are 3 alternatives which provide `automake'.
  Selection    Alternative
 +    1        /usr/bin/automake-1.4
      2        /usr/bin/automake-1.7
 *    3        /usr/bin/automake-1.9
Press enter to keep the default[*], or type selection number:

Here you should press the button 3 and the try again to build sugar.

git, the SCM

On Ubuntu 6.06 Dapper Drake, git has been deprecated. You have to run the following command to get git to work properly.

sudo update-alternatives --config git
Select option #2: git-scm

Testing sugar

When using sugar-jhbuild, you can use:

./sugar-jhbuild run

If you want to run Sugar from the source tree enter in a jhbuild shell:

./sugar-jhbuild shell 

Then from the directory sugar-jhbuild/source/sugar), use:

shell/sugar