Running Linux Applications Under Sugar

Note: This article is about running standard Linux applications inside Sugar by using the Activities icon panel rather than starting them from the Terminal.

Sugar Coating

Many standard Linux programs can be run within Sugar, but without the collaboration and other Sugar integration programmed into them. The process of adding an icon to the Sugar Activities panel is called "Sugar Coating".

A simple script to automate the process was created by a woman named CatMoran. The script:

has be confirmed to work with Firefox, Seamonkey, Midnight Commander, TuxType2, TuxPaint and Totem. It it presumed to work with many other Linux programs.
only works with programs that use the same command every time (i.e., a single command with no qualifiers). It doesn't work for roto's current mplayer configuration, because the mplayer command requires an input file name to start the program.

To setup (one time):

Start a Terminal activity.
Enter the following commands:

http://www.catmoran.com/olpc/libsugarize.so

http://www.catmoran.com/olpc/sug

http://www.catmoran.com/olpc/plain.svg

http://www.catmoran.com/olpc/ff.svg

http://www.catmoran.com/olpc/l.svg

To Run (once per program that you want to Sugar Coat):

Locate an icon you want to use/reuse.

You can copy any .svg file located in /usr/share/activities/*.activity/activity/*.svg
Or you can use one of the icons CatMoran created--and downloaded using the wget commands listed above. plain.svg is a plain circle, ff.svg is a circle with the letters FF (for Firefox) inside, l.svg is a circle with the single letter L inside. Both of the latter files can be easily edited using any text editor and one or both character(s) changed. Each letter is in plain text just before the </tspan> tags, replace them and save the file.

Enter the following commands, to log in as root and execute the sug script. T quit the script at any time, just enter nothing at the prompt and hit the Enter button.

full path and filename