Live CD

<< Emulating the XO

In the past, OLPC and the community produced Live CDs, allowing OLPC's "Sugar" interface to be run on "regular computers" without making any permanent changes to the system. Today, Sugar is developed as a generic project and is available in various different live media forms, see SugarLabs Downloads.

The remainder of the information on this page related to very old versions of Sugar, preserved for historical reference.

The currency of this article or section may be limited by out-of-date information. There may be relevant discussion on its talk page

Which livecd should I use?

There are many. OLPC doesn't recommend any in particular, but User:cjb tried most of these out on 2008-12-10 and has the following suggestion:

• if you're using qemu, virtualbox, Virtual PC, or similar, use the latest Sugar on a Stick ISO.
• if you're using vmWare fusion, you might like Bert Freudenberg's 767 build, because it uses the correct screen resolution for the OLPC (1200x900).
• if you really want to run the OLPC build in particular, and not just Sugar in general, then use the build767 ext3 image.

General instructions

1. Download. Live CDs are usually distributed as .iso (ISO 9660) images.

2. Create the CD-ROM. After downloading the .iso image, burn it to a CD-ROM using a program that can create a CD from the ISO file (Note: MS Windows XP cannot burn an ISO natively, please do not copy an ISO image/.iso file directly to CD — it's not what you want. Instead, use a Windows program such as ImgBurn, CDBurn from Microsoft's Resource Toolkit, or Infrarecorder designed to create a CD from an ISO file).

2.a. The ISO can also be copied to a prepared USB flash drive (using LiveUSB Creator for instance), or installed on a virtual machine if a CD-ROM is not available.

3. Boot. After the ISO has been copied or burned, you then boot your computer from the CD or USB flash drive or boot your 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

The OLPC Live CD is based on the OLPC ext3 build image

+	Software
XO
	13.2.11	2020-01-29
XS
	xs-0.7	2012-02-20

• Download from ftp://rohrmoser-engineering.de/pub/XO-LiveCD/ or http://skolelinux.de/XO-LiveCD/ (version of 3rd December, 2009)
  • 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 8.10 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(dead link) 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 new version of the Sugar Spin based on Fedora is available here:

http://alt.fedoraproject.org/pub/alt/olpc/0.82-2/i686/sugar-spin.iso

With this spin, you'll be able to run Sugar, which is developed by Sugar Labs 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 and recently further activities.

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

For more information on the new release, please refer to the announcement here:

https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-olpc-list/2008-December/msg00061.html

The SHA1 checksum is, if you're interested:

5f51daf59a303036858905c18a95c8270f19559d 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 an 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