Sugar on a Stick

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The v1 Strawberry release of Sugar on a Stick is here! Introduction Sugar Labs offers ubiquitous access to Sugar in a USB (Universal Serial Bus) flash memory drive (stick). The Sugar on a Stick project gives children access to their Sugar on any computer in their environment with just a USB memory stick. Taking advantage of the Fedora LiveUSB, it's possible to store everything you need to run Sugar on a single USB memory stick (minimum size 1GB). This small USB device can boot into the Sugar learning platform on different computers at home, at school, or at an after-school program, bypassing the software on the those computers. In fact, Sugar on a Stick will work even if the computer does not have a hard-drive. With Sugar on a Stick, the learning experience is the same on any computer: at school, at home, at the library, or an after-school center. You can learn more from Walter Bender's interview with Xconomy, Wayan Vota's video and Mike Lee's pictures.

What's exactly on the Stick: The Fedora version contains a compressed copy of Fedora 11 that will boot, run in memory, and maintain changes on a USB flash drive with a standard FAT16 or FAT32 partition. The files coexist with other files the user may have or put on the disk. Different types of configurations are being designed to offer the options to run virtualizations or emulations and to use virtual machines on existing computers, saving the Sugar Home folder (the learner's work) on the Stick for use at another workstation. See our resources page for more information.

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, and learn computing platforms as learning tools
• Sugar on a Stick for learning conferences to let people try Sugar and collaborate with other conference participants

Would you like to help?... Sugar Labs is entirely volunteer run. Please get involved.

Getting Sugar on a Stick

Follow the instructions below to download a copy.

Requirements:

You'll need a USB flash drive, with a size of at least 1 GB!

Notes:

Sugar on a Stick v1 Strawberry has been announced for immediate availability on June 24 and is up for download. For more instructions and the latest information, please refer to the release notes.

• Download this file: http://download.sugarlabs.org/soas/releases/soas-strawberry.iso

Create Your Stick

Please select your operating system below to get further instructions.

You can also run SoaS in a virtual machine. Sugar Labs volunteers are experimenting with VirtualBox, VMware, and QEMU. Virtual machines emulate computer hardware resources in software and allow your to install and run disc images from different operating systems on a single computer.

Boot

To boot SoaS on an XO-1 look here: Sugar on a Stick/Installation/OLPC

If you have an older machine or you just want things to immediately work without fussing with the BIOS, 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://download.sugarlabs.org/soas/releases/soas-boot.iso

Note that when you use this method your USB stick must have the label FEDORA. Name the stick FEDORA before running liveusb-creator. In Windows, you can rename a disc in the file manager properties window. This ensures the persistent overlay will be used when booting with the "Boot Helper" CD.

On most modern computers its possible to set the target computer's BIOS to boot from USB so you don't need a CD at all! 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.

Use

Once your stick boots, 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 Learners' Guide. Keyboard shortcuts also lists some of the Sugar keyboard shortcuts on a PC keyboard.

Let us know how it goes!