<div class="weblog-title"><h3>Copy of my blog post on the experience of installing Sugar on Asus Eee 701<br></h3><h3><a href="http://eduspaces.net/tabithar/weblog/763697.html">Sugar on the Eee</a></h3></div>
<p>I
wanted to put Sugar on an Asus Eee 701 for my niece. Thanks to Trademe
I could pick one up at a reasonable price. For those that know me
well, yes I had some help with setting up Sugar and yes I had some help
with writing this post. </p><p>SOAS Strawberry runs well on the Eee, but you can't really install it. There are various guides, which basically consist of </p><ol><li>Install anaconda</li><li>Run liveinst</li><li>Fight with partitioning (hint, don't choose automatic, choose custom, delete everything and make an ext3 partition)</li>
<li>Fix
the resulting broken redhat installation with no graphical interface by
installing the entire KDE stack and messing with inittab (note, you'll
need a wired ethernet connection, or epic iwconfig fu) </li><li>Install sugar</li></ol><p>The
first work around was just to dd the SOAS usb image directly onto the
Eee's drive. This was good, the Eee boots quickly and starts sugar by
default, however our USB image was only 1GB so we couldn't use the rest
of the disk, and the journal complained that it was full, even when it
wasn't. I think the journal problem was probably to do with the tricks
the live image performs to boot of read only media, since we did a
byte-for-byte copy of the live image, these are all still present when
booting from the Eee's drive.</p><p>I'm told a future version of SOAS may support installation to the hard disk. </p><p>The current solution is the <a href="https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UNR" target="_blank">Ubuntu Netbook Remix</a> and Sugar from <a href="https://launchpad.net/%7Ealsroot/+archive/ppa" target="_blank">alsroot's PPA</a>. I used the <a href="http://releases.ubuntu.com/kubuntu/9.10/" target="_blank">Karmic Koala Beta</a> and updated to the latest packages. This wasn't entirely plain sailing, Sugar's web browse activity didn't work until I did <em>apt-get build-dep python-hulahop</em>, see <a href="https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/hulahop/+bug/460111" target="_blank">this bug</a>.
This has made the Eee a really nice platform, you can alt tab between
Sugar and your other apps but not the netbook remix menu thing, so you
can't start new non-sugar apps without quitting Sugar. The only real
problem is the Eee 701's low res screen - not all activities are
designed to shrink this far, Scratch being the most missed example as
it is my nieces favourite. </p><p>The things you do (or your helper
does) to please a nine year old. Big thanks to said helper for giving
up about 10 hours more than I thought we needed. </p><p>Sharing the
experience, I hope that this helps the developers see where the issues
were and that next time I try this (I have another Eee ready) that it
is easy to see improvements - I can wait a while ;-)</p>