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Sugar on a Stick/Strawberry

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Sugar on a Stick - Strawberry

Release Notes - last update: 2009/06/24

This document provides instructions for preparing a Sugar on a Stick (SoaS) installation. It also contains a list of known issues and sources of further information, for example how to use a Boot Helper CD for very old PCs. For more detailed information, please check the SoaS wiki page.

The Sugar on a Stick Strawberry release is based on Fedora 11 with the latest updates as of June 22. It also features the latest Sugar learning environment, namely version 0.84, including 40 Activities to enrich the learning experience. Hundreds of Activities are available for download from the Sugar Activity Library. This release is a step forward from the beta release; in addition to Fedora updates, it includes supplementary sample content, which is available in the Journal. Apart from the default Fructose activities, additional Activities are included in this release. (See the Sugar Taxonomy for an explanation of these codenames.)

Fructose Activity Honey Activity Honey Activity
Browse CartoonBuilder Memorize
Calculate Colors Moon
Chat FlipSticks Paint
Etoys FreeCell Physics
Image Viewer InfoSlicer Poll
Jukebox IRC Record
Log JigsawPuzzle SliderPuzzle
Pippy JokeMachine Speak
Read Labyrinth StoryBuilder
Terminal Library ViewSlides
Turtle Art
Write

Get it!

When downloading, please pick a download server close to your current location! Here is a list with possible locations.

(The download is a CD-ROM disc image .iso file (380 MiB) that could be burned to and booted from a CD drive like a LiveCD—but no work or changes will be saved after shutdown.)

Location Link
U.S. master http://download.sugarlabs.org/soas/releases/soas-strawberry.iso
Netherlands mirror http://ftp.snt.utwente.nl/pub/software/sugarlabs/soas/releases/soas-strawberry.iso
Netherlands mirror http://ftp.nluug.nl/pub/os/Linux/distr/Sugar/soas/releases/soas-strawberry.iso

Windows Users

  1. Download the latest version of Fedora LiveUSB Creator from http://fedorahosted.org/liveusb-creator/ and extract it;
  2. Plug a target USB flash drive into your computer (minimum 1-gigabyte);
  3. Use the Format dialog to rename your USB Volume to FEDORA;
  4. Launch LiveUSB Creator;
  5. Select Sugar on a Stick v1 Strawberry in the drop-down menu on the upper-right side of the LiveUSB Creator window;
  6. Set the Persistent Storage slider to at least 160 MB (use more if you have a drive with more space);
  7. Select your USB flash drive as the target;
  8. Click the Create Live USB button and then wait for the process to finish (about 5 minutes);
  9. Eject the USB flash drive using the Safely Remove Hardware dialog.
More information is available here.

Linux Users

  1. Download the SoaS iso image from http://download.sugarlabs.org/soas/releases/soas-strawberry.iso
  2. Install these three packages: syslinux, isomd5sum, and cryptsetup
  3. Download this script: http://download.sugarlabs.org/soas/releases/livecd-iso-to-disk.sh
  4. Plug your target USB flash drive into your computer;
  5. Unmount the USB flash drive (e.g., sudo umount /dev/sdb1);
  6. Execute the script with the following command:
    sudo ./livecd-iso-to-disk.sh --overlay-size-mb 300 --home-size-mb 160 --delete-home --unencrypted-home soas-strawberry.iso /dev/sdb
Note: In this example, your USB device would be sdb! Adjust this before confirming the command, if necessary. Also, you might want to increase the home or overlay size if you have more than 1 GB of space.
More detailed information is available here.

Mac Users

Mac users will need to have access to a Linux or Windows machine to prepare their USB flash drive.

  1. Create your SoaS as described above;
  2. Download the boot helper disk: http://download.sugarlabs.org/soas/releases/soas-boot.iso
  3. Put both the CD and the USB flash drive into the machine;
  4. Turn the Mac on and press at the chime the "C" key;
  5. It should boot from the CD and continue to use the USB flash drive from this point.
Note: This is an experimental method to run SoaS on a Mac. Not all hardware configurations might be supported, as it is also noted in the #Known Issues section below. If you run into issues, you might want to consider using a virtual machine. See #XO-1 & Virtual Machines section below.
More information is available here.

XO-1 & Virtual Machines

The use of SoaS on the OLPC XO-1, as well as in virtual machines, is currently in an experimental state. Instructions for both categories are being developed here for XO-1, VirtualBox, & VMware. In the meantime, you might want to refer to the information on the general SoaS wiki page.

Boot it!

  • Set the option to boot from USB in your machine's BIOS and let it come up
  • If your machine doesn't support that, download and burn: http://download.sugarlabs.org/soas/releases/soas-boot.iso
  • Make sure to name your USB flash drive FEDORA, as it won't be recognized otherwise
  • Put both the CD and the USB flash drive in and let it boot from CD

Use it!

Once you have successfully launched Sugar on a Stick you should explore the Sugar Learning Platform. There is a guide to Sugar and help pages dedicated to most activities. (Do try running Sugar on more than one machine so you can enjoy its collaboration features.)

Help Us

Please share your feedback with us; it will help us to improve Sugar in subsequent versions of SoaS. You can always send an e-mail to feedback@sugarlabs.org or join the It's an Education Project mailing list: http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep. See all our communication channels and our Getting Involved pages.

If you encounter any hardware-related issues besides the ones listed below, please consider joining our hardware effort. Please submit the specifications of your hardware so that we work together with 'upstream' to resolve any issues.

Finally, you might also consider submitting bug reports at our bug tracker (you would need to create an account).

Known Issues

Sugar on a Stick Strawberry is based on Fedora 11, the latest release. Consequently, it contains a number of known issues with Fedora images that should be mentioned.

  • Recently, problems with ATI graphics hardware, as well as various Mac models have been reported. This was resolved by adding the nomodeset parameter to the kernel arguments.
  • If you encounter image flickering or are not able to get past a black screen, it might be worth pressing the <Escape> key at the blue screen, which appears for a second before the normal boot process starts. You'll be presented a short menu, at which you can directly press tab, then just add the nomodeset argument in the appearing line, and then boot by pressing the <Enter> key.

For more information, please refer to the list of common F11 bugs.

Custom Builds

Preliminary instructions how to customize and compose an image can be found here.

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