[Testing] Sugar on the Asus Eee 701

Peter Robinson pbrobinson at gmail.com
Tue Oct 27 04:36:24 EDT 2009


On Tue, Oct 27, 2009 at 5:54 AM, Tabitha Roder <tabitha at hrdnz.com> wrote:
> Copy of my blog post on the experience of installing Sugar on Asus Eee 701
>
> Sugar on the Eee
>
> 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.
>
> SOAS Strawberry runs well on the Eee, but you can't really install it. There
> are various guides, which basically consist of
>
> Install anaconda
> Run liveinst
> Fight with partitioning (hint, don't choose automatic, choose custom, delete
> everything and make an ext3 partition)
> 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)
> Install sugar
>
> 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.
>
> I'm told a future version of SOAS may support installation to the hard disk.
>
> The current solution is the Ubuntu Netbook Remix and Sugar from alsroot's
> PPA. I used the Karmic Koala Beta and updated to the latest packages. This
> wasn't entirely plain sailing, Sugar's web browse activity didn't work until
> I did apt-get build-dep python-hulahop, see this bug. 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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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 ;-)

You could use the current Fedora 11 Gnome LiveCD to install that and
sugar is only around 20-30 meg on top of the standard gnome desktop
and it will give you the same version of sugar but you'll probably get
better hardware support for the 701. You can also do the same with the
Fedora 12 Beta which works very well on the 701 and get the 0.86
release of sugar. Once you have sugar installed you can easily remove
the gnome desktop or leave there as a second option.

Regards,
Peter


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