CODEX2 Tutorials

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CODEX Tutorials

The following page will outline information on relative materials and attempt to provide useful tutorials for active content used by the Codex 2 Project. Short Tutorials - Although there are resources on many of the materials available, some times the information is just not self explanatory enough for beginners, where stated these will be Codex written tutorials.

Sugar On a Stick

A comprehensive, complete guide and tutorial on getting a hold of Sugar On a Stick (SoaS) and subsequently running it either from a USB, CD or through emulation can be found below. This wiki supports getting up and running on all 3 major operating systems, Linux, Mac & Windows.

Sugar On A Stick wiki.SugarLabs.org

Live USB Creator

This short guide will explain how to create a bootable USB pen drive on any system using a Fedora based ISO. This process will work for practically any Fedora distributions and makes it easy to produce persistent software installations on pen drives. This includes the Fedora Education Spin and Sugar on a Stick.

Get It

Please follow (Live USB Wiki) in order to read about the software, which is very self explanatory. This also explains how to get the latest version for Linux and Windows.

For Windows, follow the download and execute the application like any other program, which will take you through the installation process.

For Fedora, type as root (using “su”) when connected to the internet, the following command into terminal: yum install liveusb-creator

Prepare It

The first step is to get ahold of a 1GB+ USB pen drive. Note that although most USB devices will allow booting software, it has been known that some older pen drives do not allow this function. The larger your pen drive, the more space will be available to save your information persistently. Additionally, you will need the ISO image of the distribution you want to place on your USB drive.

Install It

Firstly, plug in your USB pen drive which should have a minimum of 1GB free space and run the LiveUSB Creator. Using the interface, you can download a Fedora ISO, however in this case simply “browse” for the ISO that you wish to burn to the pen drive. Next select your target device as your pen drive. Select the amount of persistent storage you would like to have on the portable system. Finally click “create Live USB” and you are already done!

Run It

Doing this will allow you to plug your pen drive into any machine supporting USB booting, and start into the pen drive rather than the computer's hard drive. Not all machines will automatically boot into a pen drive and you may be required to enter a boot menu option after switching on the machine (before it starts any current operating system on the hard drive).

Additionally, some machines may have this option switched off, which may require you to enter your BIOS and change boot settings, where older machines will likely not have the option to boot from external USB hardware. There are however Live CDs which can be created to act as Boot CDs for the pen drive you are booting from. This is out of the scope of this guide, though.

Sugar - JHBuild

Sugar-Jhbuild (Sugar-Jhbuild) provides you with Sugar Labs' most current checkout from the GIT repositories and allows you run easily a self-compiled version of Sugar (Sugar). That means that it is the most up to date (and constantly changing) available version of Sugar, being intended for developers, as it is not always stable. However, it is a way of downloading, updating, viewing, editing and compiling the software to your liking.

This is a basic quick guide, adapted from the Jhbuild guide, on what you will need in order to successfully retrieve Sugar-Jhbuild and run the software. Unfortunately the software will only run on specific distributions (Check Distro). In this example, we will be using Fedora 11.

Note: Type all commands into the terminal.

Prepare It

As of 2009/07/15, the POSSE Education Remix contains already all the required packages, so that you can directly proceed with building JHBuild! However, this may change at a later time, as JHBuild is a moving target.

If you are using a general installation of Fedora instead of the POSSE Education Remix, you might need additionally the following pre-requirements. They can be retrieved by running as root (typing “su”) into the terminal when connected to the internet: " yum install redhat-lsb git svn "

Redhat-lsb is a Fedora specfic requirement to run Sugar-JHbuild and needs to be installed. Git is obviously the repository software you need to retrieve the build. SVN is another version control system that is needed in order to correctly download the required files.

Get It

To check out Sugar-Jhbuild, create a suitable directory somewhere and execute; " git clone git://git.sugarlabs.org/sugar-jhbuild/mainline.git sugar-jhbuild "

If an error with “connection refused” is propagated in attempting to clone, this means you are probably working behind a firewall or proxy. Although there is a way to download the repository still using an http connection, subsequent commands still use git, and although there are ways of working around this, it is out of scope of this guide. See (Git Sugar-Jhbuild) for the JHbuild GIT site and (Git Sugar-Jhbuild Mainline) for a HTTP clone.

Build It

First, change directory to the new folder created in cloning jhbuild: " cd sugar-jhbuild "

Next, we need update jhbuild to retrieve the latest files, if there are newer files available: " ./sugar-jhbuild update "

After that we need to check the dependencies that are needed to correctly build the Sugar system. By running the following command, you will be provided with a list of packages that needs to be installed: " ./sugar-jhbuild depscheck "

In case you are running the POSSE Education Remix, as it has already been mentioned, you will most likely have these packages installed. If you are missing some packages, you can always yum install them. Make sure to copy the list of packages instead of typing them in!

Finally build the system - this may take some time depending on your machine! As a reference, an old Pentium 4 1.8 GHz Laptop took over an hour to complete a build. You might want to grab a coffee in the meantime: " ./sugar-jhbuild build "

If any errors occur while building, be sure to pop over to the Sugar IRC channel and ask for help (Sugar Contacts).

Run It

Once finished, you can now run Sugar in the same directory: " ./sugar-jhbuild run "

For more information, please read through the documentation provided at the Sugar Labs wiki. And don't be afraid to ask for help from the developers!

Fedora Edu SIG

The Fedora Edu SIG introduction with materials, can be found in the resources section of the wiki; however this short tutorial provides a short explanation on how to get ahold of and start using the Edu Spin.

The initial Fedora Edu Wiki outlines the official release along with the Getting Started page, which includes tutorials which were written for the Codex wiki, but placed there for reference as well.

The official release of the Spin details the release of the Edu Spin with additional information.

In short; to get ahold of the Fedora Edu Sig, simply download the Software Image as proposed in the release, and then follow the LiveUSB creator tutorial to port the .ISO file onto a pen drive.

Once completed the Fedora Edu Sig will be ready for use.