Supported systems

Ways to run Sugar

Determine which of the various methods of running Sugar meet your needs:

• Run Sugar pre-installed in a computer

  Some computers come with Sugar pre-installed, most notably the OLPC XO laptops.

  Some deployments use the Dextrose distribution of Sugar.

• Boot a Live CD / Live USB pre-installed with Sugar

  Suitable for trying Sugar without having to install any software on almost any computer—just boot Sugar off of a CD or USB drive. Note: When booting a Live CD, the Journal is not automatically saved on shutdown, because the boot media is readonly. All changes are lost upon shutdown or reboot. This is not a limitation for Live USB installations. See our Sugar on a Stick project page or other Live USB projects.

• Install Sugar

  If you are running one of the currently supported distributions, you can install Sugar using your systems standard package manager, e.g., Synaptic, apt-get, or yum. See these instructions.

  The Harmonic Distribution of the Sugar Learning Platform may also appeal to you.

• Install an emulator or virtualizer and launch a bootable Sugar disk image file

  QEMU, VirtualBox, or VMware let you run Sugar in an emulator or by virtualization on your computer—you'll need to install an emulator from which you launch Sugar and one of the Emulator image files.

Supported distributions

Please note:
Development changes occur rapidly, and the documentation here lags the current state of systems development.
For the latest information on any development project, visit their work sites.

Logo	Name	Latest Sugar	Notes
	Fedora_18	0.96.2	Primary distribution for Sugar
	OLPC	0.96.2	Prepared for XO laptops
	openSUSE	0.96.2	Part of the Linux for Education (Li-f-e) series
	Sugar on a Stick	0.96.1	Live CD/USB of Sugar Learning Environment
	Mageia	0.95.1	Forked from Mandriva
	Trisquel	0.94.1	Based on Ubuntu 11.10
	Harmonic Distribution	0.94.1	See also Sweets Distribution and Sugar Network
	ElementaryOs	0.94.1	Based on Ubuntu 10.10 & Sweets Distribution
	Tuquito	0.94.1	Based on Ubuntu 10.10 & Sweets Distribution
	Fusion Linux	0.94.1	Remix of Fedora 16 with GNOME 3.2.1
	Linux Mint	0.94.1
	Dextrose	0.92.4	Prepared for XO laptops
	Debian	0.88.1
	Linux Mint Debian Edition	0.88.1
	Ubuntu	0.88.1	Use Sweets Distribution for Sugar
	Mandriva	0.88.0
	Caixa Mágica	0.88.0	Based on Mandriva 2010.1 repositories

Matrix of Sugar solutions

There are many ways to run Sugar:

• As a complete disk image on an existing machine;
• As a session on a Linux system; or
• As part of a complete hardware-software platform.

Technical considerations

A discussion of technical considerations regarding supported systems.

Sugar for various hardware systems

• OLPC XO laptops
• Macintosh

  Intel processor

  • Sugar on a Stick/Macintosh, another example
  • VirtualBox on Mac OS X

  PowerPC processor

  • Fedora#PowerPC
  • Ubuntu/PPC

Getting the Sugar sources

Distributors can find the latest sources for the sucrose components here. Each release page has as links to the release pages of earlier releases.

Updating Sugar to the latest version

XO laptops

• OLPC:Releases
• Dextrose development site - Dextrose

Looking at Sugar variants

See Sugar System Stack for a picture of the software stack.

Starch

Starch is a complete disk image for Sugar.

Sucrose

Sucrose is the Sugar interface plus a set of demonstration activities. System maintainers should visit the Packaging Team page.