Sugar on SUSE

Installation Notes

There may still be some issues with this installation... known to work as of 6/15/06.

On OpenSUSE 10.3 following this procedure fails.

CVS on Gnome is now moved to SVN.

After installing programs required with YaST and creating a folder called 'm4' to let autogen.sh complete, ./configure failes when looking for the $MOZILLA variable on line 22323.

I have not got around this yet, has anyone else?

gecko-embed

Prerequisites

You might need to check out gecko embed and compile it. It requires a set of packages:

1. mozilla-xulrunner: You can install it from YAST.
2. mozilla-nss-devel: For 10.1 you can't install it with the default packages on package manager, but you can download it directly from suse's online repository. For 10.2 use YAST.
3. gecko-sdk: This is the equivalent of the xulrunner-devel in fedora talk for 10.1, and you can get it from suse's online repository as well. For 10.2 and later use xulrunner-devel from YAST.
4. You may need to compile avahi and install it. For 10.2 and later you can get avahi from YAST.

You need two different versions of automake installed. This is not specific to Suse, it is a general issue with sugar-jhbuild. OpenSuse 10.2 provides automake 1.9. You can install 1.7.9 from source. Once you do, as root go to /usr/local/bin and delete automake and aclocal. Versions of these files with version numbers appended will remain, and that will allow the steps in sugar-jhbuild that need the older automake to compile.

The first time you run sugar-jhhbuild build it will list out the packages it thinks it needs from your distribution. Some of these you'll need to compile from source. When the script thinks you have all of them it will run. However, you will find the the script's upfront checks are not 100% reliable, so you can still discover missing dependencies later. sugar-jhbuild allows you to easily rerun steps without starting over, so there is no need to agonize over what you might be missing before you get started. When an error shows up, just open another xterm and compile what's missing from source or get it from YAST. Then select the option to rerun the configure step for that module and hopefully that will let you continue. If you don't know how to satisfy a dependency that turns up you can "give up" on that module and continue. You may or may not wind up with a functional version of Sugar to try out.

While installing Sugar on Suse is not a painless, let it run overnight unattended process, it does work.

compile gecko-embed

• First you need to check it out from subversion. Use the following command:

svn checkout http://svn.gnome.org/svn/gecko-embed/trunk gecko-embed

• cd into the gecko-embed folder and run autogen.sh (./autogen.sh)
• run make
• run "make install" as root (or use sudo if you're a good linux citizen)

Sugar

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

cd sugar-jhbuild
git-pull
./sugar-jhbuild update
./sugar-jhbuild build

After running build you may get a list of required packages that need to be installed from YAST. Most of them are available; the rest you'll need to search for or compile from source. Then run build again.

Chances are Sugar will run just fine once everything compiles. If it doesn't:

The first time I ran sugar, it seg-faulted. We traced the problem down to an issue loading the olpc theme. I am running KDE on suse, so there might be some misconfiguration of gnome there, I'll figure it out later, right now I am happy with the workaround even if the interface doesn't look as shakadelic.

The workaround is to comment out the following two lines in sugar/__init__.py

if settings.get_property('gtk-theme-name') != 'olpc':
      settings.set_string_property('gtk-theme-name', 'olpc', )