Sugar on a Stick

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Introduction

The Sugar on a Stick project gives children access to their Sugar on any computer in their environment with just a USB flash drive. You can learn more from Walter Bender's interview with Xconomy, Wayan Vota's video and Mike Lee's pictures.

Project Goals

• Sugar on a Stick as 1 to 1 computing in an elementary school
• Sugar on a Stick to empower middle and high school students to help test
• Sugar on a Stick for conferences to let people try Sugar and collaborate with other conference participants

Get Sugar on a Stick

We are currently working towards the first SoaS release, with a hard launch date of April 10th, 2009 where Caroline Meeks and Walter Bender will premiere and distribute SoaS at FOSSVT. What this means is that the current snapshots are still unstable and in testing, and that if you download and try out this software, it might not work yet. Please download, test, and give feedback - we need your help to make our launch date - please follow the instructions below to grab your copy of it!

Downloads

Depending on what you want to do with your SoaS copy, we've several options available for testing.

available solution	current state	download location
SoaS-1 Image	post-beta quality	Template:SoaS-1 path
SoaS-2 Image	pre-beta quality	http://download.sugarlabs.org/soas/snapshots/2/Soas2-200906221314.iso
SoaS-2 Virtual Appliance	alpha quality	soas2-20090603.zip

Previous snapshots are provided in the subsequent directories on http://download.sugarlabs.org/soas/.

Creating your stick

The basics of creating and using a bootable Sugar on a Stick are:

1. Download a .iso image file containing Sugar on a Stick.
2. Use a Bootable USB creator program to copy the image file to a USB stick.
3. Configure the target computer to boot from USB.

Please see the installation instructions for more information, for example regarding multiple platforms.

Booting your stick

Once you have created your USB key, you still need to set your target system to boot from USB.

The trick is to set the BIOS to boot from USB. Unfortunately this is slightly different on each computer. Explore the setup screen for your system (press Esc or F1 while the computer is booting). If you can't figure it out, search Google for information on your computer model's BIOS.

If you have an older machine unable to boot from USB, you can burn a "Boot Helper" CD using the .iso below. This will start the boot from the CD, then read files from the USB stick:

• http://people.sugarlabs.org/garycmartin/boot.iso

Or use the Fedora boot CD image:

• http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/releases/10/Fedora/i386/os/images/boot.iso

You can also use the "PLoP Boot Manager" to create a boot floppy for machines without the ability to boot from CD or USB, see:

• http://syslinux.zytor.com/wiki/index.php/No_native_BIOS_support

Using your stick

Once your stick boot, you'll find yourself in your own Sugar environment, ready to play and learn.

For a guide on how to use Sugar, see the FLOSSmanuals Sugar Users Guide. olpc:Keyboard_shortcuts lists some of the Sugar keyboard shortcuts on a PC keyboard.

Report Bugs

Please keep notes on which version of Sugar on a Stick you have downloaded when reporting issues.

• When booting SoaS, you'll see for a short time a screen showing a kind of solar system.
• Press the "Escape" button here and you'll get to the boot menu.
• There, you should find the images name in the following structure: Soas[version number}-{date of creation}

Alternatively, you can also refer to the name of the .iso file, if you still have it around.

To find out which version of Sugar you are using you can look it up in the 'About my Computer' Section in the Control Panel.

Report bugs to http://dev.sugarlabs.org/. Use the "SoaS" component when entering new bugs.

Testing

For testing SoaS, you might want to follow the Sugar Smoke Test procedures!

Join the development effort

We are experimenting with the Sugar Labs Moodle system to help in coordinating work on this project. Please consider also joining the Sugar-Devel mailing list!

Roadmap

Review and contribute to plans and schedules on the Project roadmap page.

See Also

• DeploymentTeam/School_Key Information on various Sugar on a Stick deployments.
• Sugar on a Stick Ubuntu An alternate version of Sugar on a Stick which uses Ubuntu as the base system.
• Sugar on a Stick VirtualBox Instructions for using a preconfigured VirtualBox disk image with Sugar on a Stick.