Sugar on Gentoo Linux

Installation

It was really easy to get Sugar going under gentoo using sugar-jhbuild. The instructions on this page have been tested under Gentoo 2006.1 ~x86

Emerge(1) the prerequisites

There are a number of packages required to get going. All of these, with the exception of jhbuild, are in the portage tree.

emerge -av dev-util/git cvs subversion docbook-sgml-utils gtk-doc avahi expat gstreamer xulrunner pycurl networkmanager

I have definitely missed one or two as I started with a full xorg-x11 desktop with gnome already installed, please add them to this list if you find any!

Note: as of 2007-01-24 the networkmanager package and a number of its dependencies are now hard-masked by Gentoo due to bug reports To emerge these dependencies you will need to add the packages to /etc/portage/package.unmask. This is generally *not* recommended on Gentoo for anyone not willing to deal with problems that arise themselves.

Many of the packages are also not available without using the "unstable" flag for x86 (i.e. adding the package to /etc/portage/package.keywords).

Getting and building jhbuild

Instructions for getting and installing jhbuild can be found at: http://www.gnome.org/~jamesh/jhbuild.html#getting-started

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

The sanity checks are still very basic but, often, good information can be gotten from:

 ./sugar-jhbuild sanitycheck

Troubleshooting

missing db2html

You may find that jhbuild complains about missing 'db2html' in which case you will need to create a symlink from docbook2html:

 ln -s /usr/bin/docbook2html /usr/bin/db2html

missing gconf.def

gnome-python-desktop was complaining about a missing gconf.def:

 IOError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory:
 'sugar-jhbuild/build/share/pygtk/2.0/defs/gconf.defs'

I rectified this with a:

 touch build/share/pygtk/2.0/defs/gconf.defs

and the build completed without problem.

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