Sugar on Debian
Please contribute instructions for getting Sugar to work with Debian GNU/Linux.
Installing sugar on Debian Unstable
For now Sugar can only be installed on a mix of unstable (SID) and experimental.
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 = python2.4 # 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 may need to change the default python in your $PATH as well:
cd /usr/bin sudo ln -sf python2.5 python
Recompiling
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:
- python-avahi
- python-cairo
- python-dbus
- python-gnome2-desktop
- python-gobject
- python-gtk2
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.
suger-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
- Read the instructions Sugar_with_sugar-jhbuild, and also check Sugar
- After building everything, ./sugar-jhbuild run failed because other packages were not installed on The system. The following list should be considered prerequisite to anyone wanting to run sugar on debian unstable.
automake1.7 gtk-doc-tools xnest libtiff-tools libtiff4 libtiff4-dev gconf2 gconf2-common libgconf2-dev dbus python-dbus avahi-daemon avahi-utils avahi-discover python-avahi network-manager-dev network-manager dhcdbd libnm-* network-manager-gnome
I recovered these packages from my shell history, by searching for 'apt-get install'. Obviously, many of them brought their own dependencies and I probably happened to some important packages installed already, so please feel free to add to this list, or make corrections.
--James Bergstra