Get sugar

There are two ways to use Sugar on your own computer. SOAS (Sugar on a Stick) is a USB flash drive with Sugar which can be booted on your computer but does not change anything on your hard drive. The second way is to free some space on your hard drive and install a distribution of GNU/Linux which supports Sugar. The method allows you to choose your normal operating system or GNU/Linux with Sugar during boot.

Sugar on a Stick

MS Windows

Download the latest Sugar on a Stick .iso file. Load: Insert a USB flash drive (or SD Card) with 2 GB or more of free space into your computer and launch Rufus to create a Sugar-on-a-Stick bootable image. Boot: Insert the USB stick into a USB port on your computer. Set the option to "boot from USB" in your computer's BIOS setup, and then start up the computer.

GNU/Linux

Download the latest Sugar on a Stick .iso file. Load: Here is a simple way to create a SOAS usb flash drive. Open a shell (command line interpreter) Type df -Th. This shows all of the mounted partitions (on your computer's hard drive.) Insert a USB flash drive (or SD Card) with 2 GB or more of free space into your computer After a few moment type df -Th again. You should see an added line for your USB drive. Check the size of the drive (e.g. 3.7GB for a 4GB drive) and its type: vfat to confirm this line refers to your usb flash drive. The first field on this line, e.g. /dev/sdb1, identifies the partition. For dd command, you will use /dev/sdb [this field without the partition number]. type cd ~/Downloads. Then type ls Fedora*.iso Assuming you downloaded to the Downloads folder, this will show the SOAS iso. Type sudo dd if=Fedora-SoaS-Live-x86_64-25-1.3.iso of=/dev/sdb bs=1M with the correct if (input file) and of (output device). The dd command erases the 'of' device so make sure it doesn't say /dev/sda which would erase your computer's hard drive!!! Also make sure you have saved any valuable information on the usb flash drive. Boot: Insert the USB stick into a bootable USB port on your computer. Set the option to "boot from USB" in your computer's BIOS setup, and then start up the computer.

Apple Mac OS X

Download the latest Sugar on a Stick .iso file. Load: Here is a simple way to load a bootable USB on a Mac. Enter the Terminal: /Applications/Utilities/Terminal. Type diskutil list. You should see all the disk drives you have inserted into your computer. Insert the disk drive to which you want to write Sugar on a Stick. Type diskutil list again. You should see that your USB drive has been added to the list. If not, wait a while and repeat. Type hdiutil convert -format UDRW -o <Sugar on a Stick image file>.img <Sugar on a Stick image file> to convert the image into a bootable format. Type sudo diskutil unmountDisk <device name> to unmount the disk (it will not be ejected). Type sudo dd if=<Sugar on a Stick image file>.img.dmg of=<device name> bs=1m. sudo will ask for your password, and then dd will start writing the disk file. When dd finishes writing the disk file, type sudo diskutil eject <device name>. Boot: Insert the USB stick into a USB port on your computer, then reboot and press and hold the Option key while rebooting. You should see a list of all the EFI-recognizable USB drives that can be bootstrapped. If Sugar on a Stick is not one such drive, it cannot be bootstrapped: you need rEFInd (a fork of rEFIt).

Note

SOAS sticks created with Windows or GNU/Linux can be booted on PC computers. SOAS sticks created using an Apple computer can be booted on an Apple computer.

Installing Sugar on your computer's hard drive

The procedure to install Sugar is:

1. Free some space on the computer's hard drive
   1. For Windows, shrink the size of the D: partition or, if no D: partition, the C: partition.
   2. For GNU/Linux, use gparted, select the partition, choose move/resize, and add space after the partition (the size of the partition will be reduced accordingly).
   3. Sugar was designed for systems with very limited storage capacity. To test Sugar a space of 10GB should be plenty. For daily use a larger space may be needed.
2. Install GNU/Linux in that space
3. Add the latest version of Sugar (0.110)

To use Sugar:

1. Boot the computer choosing GNU/Linux
2. Before entering the password, click on the 'desktop' icon. Choose Sugar.
3. To quit
   1. switch to the Home View (key f4)
   2. right-click on the XO icon in the center of the screen
   3. click on log out or shutdown as appropriate

Ubuntu 17.04 Zesty

1. The latest version of Sugar (0.110) can be installed by typing:
   
   

sudo apt install sucrose

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Debian GNU/Linux 9 "Stretch"

1. install Debian Jessie in the usual way, see debian.org,
2. change /etc/apt/sources.list to use the Debian Stretch testing release,
   1. sudo sed -i 's/jessie/stretch/g' /etc/apt/sources.list
   2. sudo apt update
   3. sudo apt dist-upgrade
3. install Sugar,
   
   1. type sudo apt install sucrose