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

Sugar is supported by several GNU/Linux distributions. Sugar Labs does not support any specific distribution, but does focus development on Fedora and Debian, which helps SoaS and Ubuntu.

Logo	Name	Notes
	Sugar on a Stick	Live system of the Sugar Learning Environment
	Fedora	Fedora 34
	Ubuntu	Ubuntu 18.04 Bionic
	Debian	Debian Stretch, see also Live Build
	OLPC OS 16.04	OLPC OS for OLPC NL3 laptops based on Ubuntu 16.04 Xenial
	OLPC OS 13.x	OLPC OS for OLPC XO laptops based on Fedora 18
	openSUSE	Part of an Linux for Education (Li-f-e) series
	Trisquel Toast	Based on Ubuntu

Please note:

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

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 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.