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

The SoaS download is found here: Sugar on a Stick. Basic instructions are found below:

Sugar on a Stick installation instructions

MS Windows

Prepare: Download the Fedora Live USB Creator from FedoraHosted.
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 Fedora Live USB Creator to create a Sugar-on-a-Stick bootable image.
Note: Be sure to set the persistent storage slider to a non-zero value.
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.

Detailed installation instructions for Windows and booting instructions are available. There is also a guide to exploring Sugar.

GNU/Linux

Detailed installation instructions for GNU/Linux and booting instructions are available. There is also a guide to exploring Sugar. GNU/Linux users may also want to install the Sugar packages on their favorite distro, apart from Sugar on a Stick.

Apple Mac OS X

The instructions below are based on the Ubuntu Web page at <http://www.ubuntu.com/download/desktop/create-a-usb-stick-on-mac-osx>.

Prepare: These instructions are for 32-bit and 64-bit processors.
Download the latest Sugar on a Stick .iso file.
Load:
Here is a simple way to load a bootable USB on a Mac.
1. Enter the Terminal: /Applications/Utilities/Terminal.
2. Type diskutil list. You should see all the disk drives you have inserted into your computer.
3. Insert the disk drive to which you want to write Sugar on a Stick.
4. Type diskutil list again. You should see that your USB drive has been added to the list. If not, wait a while and repeat.
5. 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.
6. Type sudo diskutil unmountDisk <device name> to unmount the disk (it will not be ejected).
7. 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.
8. 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).

Have a MacBook? Consider these options:

MacBook Persistent SoaS v5 USB EFI Boot

Bootable CD of Trisquel 4.5 for MacBook Air

See other installation variations at Sugar Creation Kit

Burning a CD from an .iso file on a Mac

Have an iBook or PowerPC Mac?

See Ubuntu/PPC and Fedora#PowerPC.

Alternative installation instructions for Mac OS X. Also, these older installation instructions and booting instructions may be consulted.
There is also a guide to exploring Sugar.

Advanced users

Do you have an OLPC XO?

Upgrade to the latest olpc:Releases from OLPC (which may require a developer key).

Experiment with Updating XOs to the latest Sugar on a Stick release.

Some alternate installations

Once you download, and then burn or load a Sugar on a Stick (SoaS) .iso file, and boot it, the running Fedora 17 SoaS Live CD/USB may be used to install Fedora with Sugar to a hard disk or a 4 GB USB stick with the liveinst command.

- You start with a SoaS LiveOS image, and then load an uncompressed version onto the hard disk or USB stick.

- The Fedora-17-Live-SoaS.iso file is a 509 MB download.

If you have a high-speed Internet connection,
Fedora with the Sugar graphical learning environment may be installed to a hard disk or a a 4 GB USB stick with a Netinstall CD.

- Not a compressed LiveOS image like SoaS, but all of Sugar.

- This requires a high-speed Internet connection for software component downloading during installation.

Do you use GNU/Linux?

These are the steps for installing Sugar on a Stick on a USB/SD device.

This page is transcluded to various installation instruction pages.

Download the latest Sugar on a Stick .iso file.

Important change since Fedora 24 SoaS
The livecd-iso-to-disk installation script is no longer packaged in the SoaS .iso file. Starting with Fedora 24, if you want a Live USB with persistent storage, you must install the livecd-tools package to obtain the installation script and the SYSLINUX boot loader. Use this command to obtain the installer: sudo dnf install livecd-tools

Insert a USB stick of 2 GB or greater capacity into your computer.
With root user permissions at a terminal or console command line, use the command df -Th or blkid to get the USB device node name.

You should see something like the following:

[root@MyComputer ~]# df -Th
Filesystem     Type      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
rootfs         rootfs     20G  5.5G   14G  29% /
devtmpfs       devtmpfs  1.6G     0  1.6G   0% /dev
tmpfs          tmpfs     1.6G  788K  1.6G   1% /dev/shm
tmpfs          tmpfs     1.6G  1.3M  1.6G   1% /run
tmpfs          tmpfs     1.6G     0  1.6G   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
tmpfs          tmpfs     1.6G     0  1.6G   0% /media
/dev/loop0     iso9660   668M  668M     0 100% /run/soas
/dev/sdc1      vfat      2.0G  2.0G   53M  98% /run/media/MyAccount/LG
/

(The /run/media/MyAccount/ path is the new, Fedora 17 standard mount point for removable media.
/media/MyMountPoint is common on other operating systems.)

[root@MyComputer ~]# blkid
/dev/sda1: LABEL="Fedora-20" UUID="8962913a-c335-4c3b-b3ed-90fbb9c97580" TYPE="ext4" PARTUUID="1549f232-01" 
/dev/sdc1: LABEL="LIVE" UUID="D2AC-5056" TYPE="vfat"  PARTUUID="000056b3-01" 
/dev/loop0: UUID="2013-12-12-01-40-45-00" LABEL="Fedora-Live-SoaS-x86_64-20-1" TYPE="iso9660" PTUUID="461863db" PTTYPE="dos"

(Additional disk drive partitions may be listed on your computer.)

The mount point (Mounted on), Filesystem, Size, and LABEL should help you identify what you want.

Unmount the USB device filesystem:
umount /run/media/MyAccount/MyUSBdiscMountPoint
(The /run/media/MyAccount/ path is the new, Fedora 17 standard mount point. Other operating systems may use /media/MyMountPoint.)
(You should have the isomd5sum package installed so that the following installation script can verify the download.)

Load: Execute the following installation command, as the root user, in one command line with many options:

livecd-iso-to-disk --reset-mbr --overlay-size-mb 500 --home-size-mb 800 --unencrypted-home /path/to/downloaded.iso /dev/sd?1

The '?' in the final parameter represents the target USB device scsi drive node, such as sdb1 or sdc1, etc., and /path/to/downloaded.iso is the location and name of the .iso file.

The operating system will occupy ~670 MB, and the overlay and home size arguments, 500 and 800, were selected to fit in a 2 GB device. These may be adjusted depending on your preferences and device capacity (see LiveOS image). SoaS 10 can be squeezed into a 1 GB device with 160 and 170. On a 4 GB device, one might use 1000 and 1600 for the size arguments.

The installation transcript should look something like the following:

[root@MyComputer ~]# /run/soas/LiveOS/livecd-iso-to-disk --reset-mbr --overlay-size-mb 500 --home-size-mb 800 --unencrypted-home /home/MyAccount/Downloads/Fedora-Live-SoaS-x86_64-20-1.iso /dev/sdc1
Verifying image...
/home/MyAccount/Downloads/Fedora-Live-SoaS-x86_64-20-1.iso:   b0a9414ff7eb79b680d5c86440e19587
Fragment sums: 9bfe23577651c88dcfb78c76ac3a28a5c53eead4561e3bdc5921b8b2e748
Fragment count: 20
Press [Esc] to abort check.
Checking: 100.0%

The media check is complete, the result is: PASS.

It is OK to use this media.
Copying live image to target device.
squashfs.img
    630,784,000 100%    1.96MB/s    0:05:06 (xfr#1, to-chk=0/1)
osmin.img
          8,192 100%    0.00kB/s    0:00:00 (xfr#1, to-chk=0/1)
Updating boot config file
Initializing persistent overlay file
500+0 records in
500+0 records out
524288000 bytes (524 MB) copied, 216.717 s, 2.4 MB/s
Initializing persistent /home
800+0 records in
800+0 records out
838860800 bytes (839 MB) copied, 344.643 s, 2.4 MB/s
Formatting unencrypted /home
mke2fs 1.42.8 (20-Jun-2013)
Filesystem label=
OS type: Linux
Block size=4096 (log=2)
Fragment size=4096 (log=2)
Stride=0 blocks, Stripe width=0 blocks
51296 inodes, 204800 blocks
10240 blocks (5.00%) reserved for the super user
First data block=0
Maximum filesystem blocks=209715200
7 block groups
32768 blocks per group, 32768 fragments per group
7328 inodes per group
Superblock backups stored on blocks: 
	32768, 98304, 163840

Allocating group tables: done                            
Writing inode tables: done                            
Creating journal (4096 blocks): done
Writing superblocks and filesystem accounting information: done

tune2fs 1.42.8 (20-Jun-2013)
Setting maximal mount count to -1
Setting interval between checks to 0 seconds
Installing boot loader
Target device is now set up with a Live image!

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.

To create more Sugar Sticks on other 1 GB or greater USB or SD devices, while running Sugar on a Stick, one must first obtain the livecd-tools installer as above, then in the Terminal Activity, execute this command as the root user:
livecd-iso-to-disk --reset-mbr --overlay-size-mb 160 --home-size-mb 170 --delete-home --unencrypted-home /run/initramfs/livedev /dev/sd?1

Replace /dev/sd?1 with a new device node for the second USB/SD device that you want to load with Sugar on a Stick.

See these links to pages on the Sugar Labs wiki for GNU/Linux distributions where Sugar has been installed.

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.
The 'Notes' column should indicate if the image is for pre-release testing.

Name	Latest Sugar	Notes
Ubuntu	0.110	Ubuntu 17.04 Zesty
Debian	0.110	Debian Stretch
Debian on rpi3	0.110	Debian jessie
OLPC	0.110	Prepared for XO laptops
Ubuntu on rpi3	0.110	Ubuntu 17.04 (sugar on rpi3)
Fedora	0.108.1	Primary distribution for Sugar (Fedora 25)
Sugar on a Stick	0.108.1	Live CD/USB of the Sugar Learning Environment
openSUSE	0.107.2	Part of the Linux for Education (Li-f-e) series
Trisquel Toast	0.102.0	Based on Ubuntu
Mageia	0.95.1	Forked from Mandriva
ElementaryOs	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	mint 13 & mint 14 Using Sweets Distribution
Dextrose	0.92.4	Prepared for XO laptops
Linux Mint Debian Edition	0.88.1
Mandriva	0.88.0