Platform Team/Guide/Sugar via Sweets

This guide describes how to run Sugar using Sugar Packaging Management System, Sweets. See also introduction page and more detailed Usage guide.

Installation

Fedora specific instructions:

sudo yum install gnome-packagekit

Important notes for XO users:
Some XO images might mount /var/cache/yum to the tmpfs. With this limited cache capacity, it will be mostly impossible to install anything of large size from the Fedora repositories. To work around this limitation, become a root user and enter the umount /var/cache/yum command in the Terminal activity or a console. To persist this change for subsequent boots, remove the corresponding line from the /etc/fstab file.

Debian and Ubuntu specific instructons:

sudo apt-get install packagekit-gnome

Then, in all environments:

wget http://download.sugarlabs.org/sweets/sweets/installer.sh
sh installer.sh

After installing PackageKit, you need to restart the DBus system bus. The easiest way is to just restart the machine. If PackageKit was already installed, you need to relogin from X session at least.

What Sugar to launch

There are two types of Sugars that are accessible via Sweets:

sdk/sugar, for pristine Sugar;
dextrose/sugar, for Sugar based on Dextrose.

Both Sugars can be used in the same way. This guide uses dextrose/sugar.

Launch

To launch recent stable Sugar in emulator mode, type in Terminal activity or in any other terminal:

sweets dextrose/sugar:emulator

To make it possible to have additional dependencies involved, e.g., to run Browse activity, use -S command-line argument:

sweets -S dextrose/sugar:emulator

To run a particular, but not the latest, e.g., 0.88 version:

sweets dextrose/sugar:emulator = 0.88

To get information about what exact versions are provided, use status command with -v argument:

sweets status -v dextrose/sugar

Running sugar from X session

To start Sugar in the session mode, i.e., not from Xephyr, it will be useful to add a new X session. Place sweets invocation into your ~/.xsession file:

PATH=$HOME/.local/bin:$PATH
sweets sdk/sugar

and create a /usr/share/xsessions/sweets.desktop desktop file:

[Desktop Entry]
Encoding=UTF-8
Name=Sweets
GenericName=Sweets
Exec=/etc/X11/Xsession
Type=Application

After getting a login screen, Sweets session should be present in the sessions list.

Upgrade

To upgrade Sweets itself, type in Terminal activity, or any other terminal:

sweets upgrade

To update information about new Sugar versions that come via Sweets, use -R command-line argument with any sweets launch variant, e.g., with status command:

sweets status -R dextrose/sugar