Sugar on a Stick Ubuntu

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Note: this procedure works for these circumstances Taken from http://dev.laptop.org/~probono/sbuntu/

* Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex * Built November 29, 2008 * Browse activity works

How to make a Ubuntu 8.10 Sugar Live USB system

  1. Download the stock ubuntu-8.10-desktop-i386.iso and burn it
  2. Create a Live USB system using the built-in Live USB installer (In Ubuntu 8.10 and later: System --> Administration --> Create a USB startup disk). If you choose "Stored in reserved extra space", do NOT use up the entire available space, but leave at least 100 MB so that we can add sugar in the next step.
  3. Add the file sugar.squashfs to the directory casper/ on the USB stick

How to make a Ubuntu 8.10 Sugar Live USB system from Windows or on a non-Ubuntu Distribution

(Note that these instructions work on Fedora as well)

  1. Download the stock ubuntu-8.10-desktop-i386.iso
  2. Download UNetbootin for Windows (or Linux) and run the application
  3. Supply the Ubuntu 8.10 desktop ISO file in the "Diskimage" option, select your target USB drive, and press "OK" to make an Ubuntu Live USB
  4. Add the file sugar.squashfs to the directory casper/ on the USB stick

Done

The file sugar.squashfs is kept separate from the Ubuntu system itself, which stays unmodified. This way, sugar can easily be updated without having to download the entire Ubuntu system. Just replace sugar.squashfs with the updated version.

The instructions below are only interesting if you want to make your own sugar.squashfs instead of the one provided for download here. How to make your own sugar.squashfs

First, create a stock Ubuntu 8.10 live USB system as described above and boot from it. Next, we need to fix a bug the initrd so that /cow is shown when we use the "show-cow" boot option by executing this script. Now, we add "show-cow" to the boot arguments in syslinux.conf. Then, boot the system using the fix initrd, and do the following in the running system: 

sudo su
echo "deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu intrepid universe" >> /etc/apt/sources.list
echo "deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/sugarteam/ubuntu intrepid main" >> /etc/apt/sources.list
apt-get update
apt-get --force-yes -y  install sugar-* squashfs-tools
  • Then do
cat > exclude <<\EOF
etc
casper
cdrom
cow
home
media
rofs
tmp
var/cache
var/log
var/run
var/tmp
var/lock
var/mail
EOF
  • It is important to exclude etc because otherwise permissions are mixed up
mount /cdrom -o remount,rw

time mksquashfs /cow/ /cdrom/casper/sugar.squashfs -ef exclude
  • If you want the system to boot straight into Sugar (instead of Gnome) during boot, do:
mkdir -p add/etc/skel/
cat > add/etc/skel/.dmrc <<\EOF
[Desktop]
Session=sugar
EOF
mksquashfs add/ /cdrom/casper/sugar.squashfs

Acknowledgments

  • OLPC Foundation
  • Sugar Labs
  • Debian Edu Developers and Debian OLPC
  • Ubuntu sugarteam

Author

Simon Peter http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:probono

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