Sugar on Ubuntu
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So you want to try out Sugar on your Ubuntu machine? No problem! There are five 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. Please see the sugar-jhbuild on Ubuntu page for Ubuntu-specific information as well.
Option 3 - Hardy packages
Sugar 0.79 (Update.1 / 8.1.0)
On Ubuntu 8.04 LTS ("Hardy Heron") you can install sugar from the official Ubuntu universe repositories. You get a version similar to the version included in OLPC's 8.1.0 release (build 703, formerly known as Update.1).
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)
See Jani Monoses' announcement mail for more details on these packages in Ubuntu. See his blog post on Sugar in Ubuntu for details on why some core activities could not be included.
Add the PPA repository to get Write working, and some additional activities: Analyse, Measure, Newsreader, Paint and Record.
CAVEATS:
- These packages are not the latest development versions. See Sugar with sugar-jhbuild if you want up-to-the-minute Sugar.
- These packages are similar to, but not exactly the 8.1.0 "Update.1" (Build 703) version of sugar. That had sugar 0.75.14 off the update-1 branch, whereas this has 0.79.0. For activity development, it's probably close enough, but there may be issues arising from this difference.
Sugar 0.82
James Munro packaged the 0.82 release in a PPA.
See his blog post for instructions.
The packages are similar to the abovementioned 0.79 hardy packages.
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 in /usr/share/sugar/shell/ so
cp install/share/sugar/shell/emulator.py install/share/sugar/shell/emulator.py.backup
should be
sudo cp /usr/share/sugar/shell/emulator.py /usr/share/sugar/shell/emulator.py.backup
Jani Monoses-3 on Nabble posted instructions for getting python-abiword so that you can install Write and Pollbuilder. You need to add the repository lines
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/sugar/ubuntu hardy main deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/sugar/ubuntu hardy main
to your /etc/apt/sources.list.
However, once installed they will not run due to other failed dependencies.
Jani also provided notes on reasons why various other packages didn't make it into Ubuntu.
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
Option 5 - Sbuntu: Ubuntu Live USB/SD system that boots into Sugar
Basically, you download a stock ubuntu-8.04.1-desktop-i386.iso, convert it into a Live USB/SD system, and then add the file sugar.squashfs to the directory casper/ on the USB/SD partition. Done.
In the same way, you could add the file to a Live CD.
The file sugar.squashfs is kept separate from the Ubuntu system itself, which stays unmodified. This way, sugar can easily be updated without having to download the entire Ubuntu system. Just replace sugar.squashfs with the updated version.
For more information, see http://dev.laptop.org/~probono/sbuntu/