Sugar on Ubuntu

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So you want to try out Sugar on your Ubuntu machine? No problem! There are four installation options available.

Note that the instructions on this page are for Ubuntu Gutsy and that some notes on older version are available at the /Older Ubuntu versions page.

The options

Option 1 - Emulated XO

An emulated XO laptop is the recommended platform both for "checking out" the Sugar environment and for quickly getting started developing new activities. By installing an emulation package on your (reasonably powerful) host desktop, you can run an emulated version of the Sugar environment which is essentially the same code as runs on the real laptops.

An emulated XO does not provide tools such as SVG editors or Integrated Development Environments. You will normally run such software on your host machine and push the results onto the emulated machine.

The emulated XO has certain limitations with regard to the specialized hardware in the XO. See the Developer's FAQ for pointers on how to simulate the special hardware.

Option 2 - sugar-jhbuild

Compared with using an Emulated XO, installing sugar takes more time and space to set up, and can be difficult to maintain, but results in a more flexible better environment. This is what the core development team uses. If you are intending to work on the core system you will likely need to use sugar-jhbuild to set up your environment.

Option 3 - Offical Deb Packages for Hardy LTS

You can install sugar now from the official Ubuntu Universe repositories. To install 

 $ sudo aptitude install sugar sugar-activities sugar-emulator

Here is a description of the packages:

  • sugar - see Sugar
  • sugar-emulator - run sugar in a window using Xephyr
  • sugar-activities - all of the common activities
  • sugar-{calculate,write,memorize,connect,chat,read,web,newsreader,measure,pippy,paint,record,turtleart}-activity - individual activities

Then you can either run sugar-emulator or when logging in choose the Sugar session in the display manager (tested with GDM)

CAVEATS:

Emulator Screen resolution: you can change the resolution of the emulator following the instructions of Sugar-jhbuild#Configure_the_mode_and_resolution_of_Sugar but note that the emulator.py is on /usr/bin/sugar-emulator so 

cp /sugar-jhbuild/build/share/sugar/shell/emulator.py /sugar-jhbuild/build/share/sugar/shell/emulator.py.backup

should be 

sudo cp /usr/bin/sugar-emulator /usr/bin/sugar-emulator.backup

Option 4 - Unoffical Deb Packages for Gutsy

There are packages of Sugar and of about a dozen activities provided by Jani Monoses, his blog, with more information can be found at [1].

To install 

 $ sudo -s
 # echo "deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/jani/ubuntu gutsy main" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/sugar.list
 # apt-get update
 # apt-get install sugar sugar-emulator sugar-activities

Here is a description of the packages:

  • sugar - see Sugar
  • sugar-emulator - run sugar in a window using Xephyr
  • sugar-activities - all of the common activities
  • sugar-{calculate,write,memorize,connect,chat,read,web,newsreader,measure,pippy,paint,record,turtleart}-activity - individual activities

Then you can either run sugar-emulator or when logging in choose the Sugar session in the display manager (tested with GDM)

CAVEATS:

  • The repo is not signed so you need to say 'y' when asked by apt-get
  • The sugar package doesn't depend on the libraries it really needs. Hence you are stuck to finding and getting them yourself. (see below)
    • ^-- Please list which exact section below; thanks!
    • Please add a comment on how to fix errors like: 'import site' failed; thanks!
  • These packages are not the latest versions. See Sugar with sugar-jhbuild if you want the latest versions.
  • The gstreamer package is also required and not in the list of package dependencies.
    • ^-- Please list the full package name of gstreamer (I got "E: Couldn't find package gstreamer"); thanks!

Emulator Screen resolution: you can change the resolution of the emulator following the instructions of Sugar-jhbuild#Configure_the_mode_and_resolution_of_Sugar but note that the emulator.py is on /usr/bin/sugar-emulator so 

cp /sugar-jhbuild/build/share/sugar/shell/emulator.py /sugar-jhbuild/build/share/sugar/shell/emulator.py.backup

should be 

sudo cp /usr/bin/sugar-emulator /usr/bin/sugar-emulator.backup

Extra tips on using sugar-jhbuild in Ubuntu

apt-get the prerequisites

You need a number of packages from the Ubuntu repositories. Some of these packages are not available for the stock Ubuntu install, and you will need to enable the universe and multiverse repositories. (You can do this by either using the Synaptic Package Manager, or simply editing /etc/apt/sources.list, but don't forget to reload afterwards.)

Gutsy 7.10 

 sudo aptitude install \
  git-core automake1.9 cvs python-json python-numpy libdbus-glib-1-dev python-cairo-dev\
  automake1.7 bison flex libtool subversion darcs g++ gettext libpoppler-glib-dev\
  libgstreamer-plugins-base0.10-dev xserver-xephyr libavahi-glib-dev libjpeg62-dev \
  libtiff4-dev libsqlite3-dev python-avahi  libfribidi-dev libenchant-dev \
  libgnutls-dev libboost-dev libxslt1-dev libgsf-1-dev libasound2-dev libssl-dev\
  libxt-dev libgtk2.0-dev libgconf2-dev  liboil-dev libtheora-dev libncurses5-dev\
  python-gnome2-dev libglade2-dev gtk-doc-tools libavahi-client-dev libxml2-utils gnome-doc-utils\
  libxres-dev libwv-dev libgnomevfs2-dev python-simplejson python-json libcroco3-dev

Even with the universe and multiverse enabled you can have some problems installing these packages. You can fix them using the sources.list generator that you can find on www.ubuntu-nl.org.

There may be more packages required; if you find any more, please append them to this list. 

Note:I needed to install libgnomeui-dev version 2.16.1, libgnomeuimm-2.6-1c2a, and 
libgnomeuimm-2.6-dev. I no longer get the error "package libgnomeui-2.0 cannot be found" 
however I still encounter other errors [chundevi]
I was building an Edgy-based VM from a debootstrap base and using Edgy packages. I needed to install librsvg2-common before sugar would run.

Note: If you get the error "package python-avahi not available" try this- On PPC, I used the following command: 

sudo apt-get install build-essential cvs docbook-utils subversion libgtk2.0-dev libidl-dev \
gnome-common gtk-doc-tools libxt-dev automake1.7 automake1.8 automake1.9 python-gtk2-dev git-core python-dev libgconf2-dev libgnome2-dev \
python-cairo-dev libtiff4-dev python-gnome2-dev libxdamage-dev libxdamage1 libxcomposite-dev libgnomeui-dev libtool libfribidi-dev \
libgsf-1-dev libbz2-dev libwmf-dev libgstreamer0.10-dev libgstreamer-plugins-base0.10-dev libgnomeprintui2.2-dev libenchant-dev \
telepathy-gabble python-telepathy xserver-xephyr python-setuptools python-sqlalchemy \
matchbox-window-manager

Xapian

Start Avahi

(not needed on Dapper) Then you must ensure that the Avahi daemon is enabled and running. Execute: 

sudo vim /etc/default/avahi-daemon

and ensure the directive "AVAHI_DAEMON_START" is set to 1. Then execute: 

sudo /etc/init.d/avahi-daemon start

Packages from Gutsy

Edit your /etc/apt/sources.list to include 'gutsy' repositories (main and universe), then upgrade/install: 

sudo aptitude install python-dbus python-telepathy

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
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