[sugar] Status of Sugar in Ubuntu 8.04

Jani Monoses jani at ubuntu.com
Tue Apr 29 01:52:50 EDT 2008


Hello,

while some important activities are missing, Sugar can be installed and 
used in Ubuntu 8.04 out of the official Universe repositories. It is a 
very easy way of trying it out.

The packages to install are sugar-emulator and sugar-activities.

The latter is a metapackage depending on

sugar-calculate-activity
sugar-chat-activity
sugar-connect-activity
sugar-logviewer-activity
sugar-memorize-activity
sugar-pippy-activity
sugar-terminal-activity
sugar-turtleart-activity
sugar-web-activity

It can be started from the command prompt as sugar-emulator or from the 
application menu item of the same description. There's also a GDM login 
option for Sugar which will run it natively instead of in Xephyr. The 
latter option I have not tested as much as the emulator.

Abiword 2.6 did not make it in Ubuntu 8.04 but if you add the Sugar repo 
for Hardy as described at

https://launchpad.net/~sugar/+archive/

you can also install python-abiword and then sugar-write-activity, 
sugar-jigsawpuzzle-activity and sugar-sliderpuzzle-activity from 
Universe will work as well.

Squeak in Ubuntu is not new enough and does not include the Etoys image 
so that activity is missing too.

The read activity does not work either - hopefully the Sugar specific 
changes to Evince will be pushed upstream in this 2.23 GNOME cycle.

Penguintv and TamTam are also notably missing, neither included license 
texts in the tarballs at the time of packaging, and that prevents 
uploading to Ubuntu - or any distro for that matter AFAIK.

Paint and Record contain i386 specific shared objects so I wanted to 
take the time and see how those are best installed without breaking 
either Sugar's "one directory pe activity" or Debian's packaging
policy.

It looks like plenty of things are missing, but it's ok for getting 
started in learning or developing for Sugar and for interacting with 
other Sugar installations on the Internet.

Jani



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