Sugar on Gentoo Linux
Installation
Sugar can be built on Gentoo using the sugar-jhbuild tool. These instructions are being updated on 2007-02-28 to reflect current build practice as successfully completed by the PyCon sprint. Test machine was an up-to-date x86 laptop with minimal ~x86 features added to support the Sugar environment.
Prerequisites
You will need to emerge rather a lot of software, with many of the packages being ~x86 or hard-masked. For any package which is hard-masked, you will have to add the package to your /etc/portage/package.unmask file (which you may need to create).
Please keep in mind that unmasking hard-masked files is strongly discouraged by Gentoo, and the project will generally *not* provide support for problems encountered with the software (i.e. ask on the Sugar lists before you ask on the Gentoo lists for hard-masked packages).
To unmask a hard-masked package, add a line such as the following to your /etc/portage/package.unmask file:
=net-misc/networkmanager-0.6.4_pre20061028-r1 =dev-libs/libnl-1.0_pre6 =net-misc/dhcdbd-1.14-r1 =dev-lang/python-2.5-r1
To unmask an ~x86-masked package, add a line such as the following to your /etc/portage/package.keywords file:
dev-lang/python ~x86 dev-python/setuptools ~x86 net-libs/xulrunner ~x86 net-misc/networkmanager ~x86 dev-libs/libnl ~x86 net-misc/dhcdbd ~x86 dev-python/dbus-python ~x86
Note that you can use the full format (including comparison operator and version) as specified in the package.unmask file above as well.
You will also likely need to specify USE flags for a number of packages. These are added to the /etc/portage/package.use file in a format like so:
dev-util/subversion -apache2 net-dns/avahi dbus python dev-python/gnome-python-extras firefox x11-base/xorg-server kdrive
Python 2.5 is Required
You will need to upgrade your Gentoo installation to Python 2.5, then upgrade all of the packages dependent on Python (normally Python modules):
emerge -avDt >=dev-lang/python2.5 python-updater
Note that Python is a core component of Gentoo's portage package management system. As such it is potentially possible that you could damage your system by using an unsupported Python version. Probably not a huge risk, but be careful!
Emerge the prerequisites
Sugar requires a large number of standard Gentoo packages, you will need to emerge all of them in order to build the package:
emerge -avDt \ dev-util/git\ cvs subversion\ docbook-sgml-utils\ gtk-doc\ avahi\ expat\ gstreamer\ xulrunner\ pycurl\ networkmanager\ gnome-python-desktop\ gnome-python-extras\ >=dev-python/dbus-python-0.80.1\ darcs
You will also likely need to compile the xorg-server module with a new USE flag "kdrive", which specifies the creation of the "nested X servers", (particularly the "Xephyr" server which Sugar uses) specified in the /etc/portage/package.use:
emerge -avDt --newuse xorg-server
You will also need the "dm-crypt" module compiled into your kernel. To check for the presence of the module:
modprobe dm-crypt
if this fails, enable the option in your kernel and rebuild the kernel with genkernel (or whatever you prefer for your kernel building pleasure):
Device Drivers Multi-Device Support Device mapper support [*] Crypt Target Support
Getting and building jhbuild
jhbuild is a script that allows for building source-code from various source-code repositories and/or source tarballs (basically a poor-man's version of emerge for developres). You will need to check it out of it's svn repository and do a standard GNU-style installation:
svn co http://svn.gnome.org/svn/jhbuild/trunk jhbuild cd jhbuild make make install
You do *not* need to run jhbuild directly. sugar-jhbuild just requires the package to be installed in order to function.
More detailed instructions [are available].
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 build
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
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