Sugar on a Stick/Installation


SoaS installation on USB/SD devices

with Microsoft Windows

  • Either use Fedora Live USB Creator
    1. Download the Live USB Creator from FedoraHosted here.
    2. Insert a USB flash drive (or SD Card) with 1 GB or more of free space into your computer. (See LiveOS image and Cautions with using Live USB devices regarding flash drive size and usage.)
    3. Launch Live USB Creator.
    4. Select the 'Browse' button to 'Use existing Live CD' and find the downloaded .iso file image on your system.
    5. Adjust the Persistent Storage slider. This enables you to save changes to the system and additional Sugar Activities onto the device.
    6. Select your flash drive as the target, and click the Create Live USB button.
    7. Wait for the process to finish, then close the Live USB Creator program.
    8. Stop your flash drive using the Safely Remove Hardware dialog, and eject it.
Note: The above installation method does not allow the full optimization of data storage that comes from installing a separate, persistent home directory—see the alternate method below.
  • or Burn a CD-ROM disc with the soas-mirabelle.iso file.
    1. Use Windows 7 built-in Disk Image Burner or a free utility, like ImgBurn, to write the downloaded SoaS.iso file onto a blank CD.
    2. Insert a USB flash drive (or SD Card) with 1 GB or more of free space into your computer. (See LiveOS image and Cautions with using Live USB devices regarding flash drive size and usage.)
    3. Boot your computer with the CD-ROM disc. You probably need to press F1, F12, Esc, or a similar key as the computer starts up to adjust the boot source to the CD-ROM device.
    4. A successful boot will take you into Sugar on a Stick Mirabelle. From there, open the Terminal Activity, Activity-terminal.png, from the Home view.
    5. Click the 'Become root' icon, Activity-become-root.svg, to gain administrative permissions in the Terminal session.
    6. Change the working directory to /LiveOS/
      cd /LiveOS/
    7. execute the Linux command line:
      ./livecd-iso-to-disk --overlay-size-mb 200 --home-size-mb 200 --delete-home --unencrypted-home /dev/live /dev/sd?1
Be certain of your USB/SD scsi drive node name (such as sda, sdb, etc.) and partition (such as 1, 2, etc.), yielding, for example, /dev/sdb1. Use the mount command to confirm it before executing the script.
Note: Every Mirabelle or Strawberry Sugar on a Stick can copy its original installation to another USB stick or SD card by following the above instructions. See Sugar on a Stick/Sugar Clone for instructions on how to customize the contents of a Sugar on a Stick device.
  • or Launch a virtual machine, such as VirtualBox with the soas-mirabelle.iso file.
    See SoaS on VirtualBox below.

with Apple Macintosh

with GNU/Linux

  1. Use this script file http://bit.ly/livecd-iso-to-disk to create a bootable image.
    (Run chmod +x livecd-iso-to-disk.sh after you download the script to make it executable.)
  2. Execute, as the root user, in one command with arguments, the following:
    ./livecd-iso-to-disk.sh --overlay-size-mb 200 --home-size-mb 200 --delete-home --unencrypted-home /path/to/source.iso /dev/sd?1
    where '?' in the final parameter represents the target bootable device node, such as sdb1 or sdc1, etc.
    Be certain of your USB/SD scsi drive node name (such as sda, sdb, etc.) and partition (such as 1, 2, etc.).
    Use the df -Th command to confirm your devices before executing the script.
         You should see something like the following:
[root@MyComputer ~]# df -Th
Filesystem    Type    Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1     ext4     18G  6.6G   11G  38% /
tmpfs        tmpfs    1.6G  740K  1.6G   1% /dev/shm
/dev/sdc1     vfat     15G  697M   15G   5% /media/SANDY
/dev/sdb1     vfat     15G  2.0G   13G  14% /media/TOSHIBA
where the mount point and filesystem sizes should help you identify what you want.
[root@MyComputer ~]#
./livecd-iso-to-disk.sh --overlay-size-mb 200 --home-size-mb 200 --delete-home --unencrypted-home /mnt/VMs/soas-x86_64-20100509.09.iso /dev/sdb1

Verifying image...
/mnt/VMs/soas-x86_64-20100509.09.iso:   7c5f3227e4d87bb03f1cf89415ee80ce
Fragment sums: b68ffc49a1213bca823fd5f16887291c571b44d55755488b3c229dafb631
Fragment count: 20
Checking: 100.0%

The media check is complete, the result is: PASS.

It is OK to use this media.

Copying live image to USB stick
Updating boot config file
Initializing persistent overlay file
200+0 records in
200+0 records out
209715200 bytes (210 MB) copied, 16.6121 s, 12.6 MB/s
Initializing persistent /home
200+0 records in
200+0 records out
209715200 bytes (210 MB) copied, 15.2779 s, 13.7 MB/s
Formatting unencrypted /home
mke2fs 1.41.10 (10-Feb-2009)
Filesystem label=
OS type: Linux
Block size=1024 (log=0)
Fragment size=1024 (log=0)
Stride=0 blocks, Stripe width=0 blocks
51200 inodes, 204800 blocks
10240 blocks (5.00%) reserved for the super user
First data block=1
Maximum filesystem blocks=67371008
25 block groups
8192 blocks per group, 8192 fragments per group
2048 inodes per group
Superblock backups stored on blocks: 
	8193, 24577, 40961, 57345, 73729

Writing inode tables: done                            
Creating journal (4096 blocks): done
Writing superblocks and filesystem accounting information: done

This filesystem will be automatically checked every 23 mounts or
180 days, whichever comes first.  Use tune2fs -c or -i to override.
tune2fs 1.41.10 (10-Feb-2009)
Setting maximal mount count to -1
Setting interval between checks to 0 seconds
Installing boot loader
USB stick set up as live image!

SoaS on VirtualBox

Backup and Restore

Some backup and restore options for Sugar on a Stick include the following:


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