Sugar is a

free and open-source Free and open-source software (FOSS) is a term used to refer to groups of software consisting of both free software and open-source software where anyone is freely licensed to use, copy, study, and change the software in any way, and the source ...

desktop environment In computing, a desktop environment (DE) is an implementation of the desktop metaphor made of a bundle of programs running on top of a computer operating system that share a common graphical user interface (GUI), sometimes described as a grap ...

designed for interactive learning by children. Copyright by SugarLabs. Developed as part of the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) project, Sugar was the default interface on

OLPC XO-1 The OLPC XO (formerly known as $100 Laptop, Children's Machine, 2B1) is a low cost laptop computer intended to be distributed to children in developing countries around the world, to provide them with access to knowledge, and opportunities to " ...

laptop computers. The OLPC XO-1.5 and later provided the option of either the Gnome or Sugar interfaces. Sugar is available as a

Live CD A live CD (also live DVD, live disc, or live operating system) is a complete bootable computer installation including operating system which runs directly from a CD-ROM or similar storage device into a computer's memory, rather than loading f ...

, as

Live USB A live USB is a portable USB-attached external data storage device containing a full operating system that can be booted from. The term is reminiscent of USB flash drives but may encompass an external hard disk drive or solid-state drive, ...

, and a package installable through several

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, whi ...

distributions. Unlike most other desktop environments, Sugar does not use the "

desktop A desktop traditionally refers to: * The surface of a desk (often to distinguish office appliances that fit on a desk, such as photocopiers and printers, from larger equipment covering its own area on the floor) Desktop may refer to various compu ...

", " folder" and "

window A window is an opening in a wall, door, roof, or vehicle that allows the exchange of light and may also allow the passage of sound and sometimes air. Modern windows are usually glazed or covered in some other transparent or translucent mat ...

" metaphors. Instead, Sugar's default full-screen activities require users to focus on only one program at a time. Sugar implements a journal which automatically saves the user's running program session and allows them to later use an interface to pull up their past works by date, an activity used, or file type.

Design principles

Sugar has the objective of being suitable for even inexperienced users but provides more advanced facilities for the more experienced. The project's stated goal is to "avoid bloated interfaces", and "limit the controls to those immediately relevant to the task at hand.". Applications run full screen, double-clicking is not used, and menus show icons. Sugar is written in Python, an

interpreted language In computer science, an interpreter is a computer program that directly executes instructions written in a programming or scripting language, without requiring them previously to have been compiled into a machine language program. An interprete ...

, and can be modified by users with programming experience. Desktop environments used by many operating systems are written in

compiled language A compiled language is a programming language whose implementations are typically compilers (translators that generate machine code from source code), and not interpreters (step-by-step executors of source code, where no pre-runtime translation ...

s such as C.

Software components

Applications developed by Sugar Labs are very pragmatic which offers several opportunities to avail which enhances the skills and makes them dexterous in their fiel
Sugar Activities
include Turtle Blocks 3D, Ruler, Recall and many more.

Hundreds of learning activities for Sugar can be downloaded from the Sugar Activity Library. Additional activities are available from third parties, such as the Project Ceibal portal in

Uruguay Uruguay (; ), officially the Oriental Republic of Uruguay ( es, República Oriental del Uruguay), is a country in South America. It shares borders with Argentina to its west and southwest and Brazil to its north and northeast; while bordering ...

History

In May 2006 Sugar's developers described it as primarily a "tool for expression," and plans were in place to include

multimedia Multimedia is a form of communication that uses a combination of different content forms such as text, audio, images, animations, or video into a single interactive presentation, in contrast to tradit ...

and

social networking A social network is a social structure made up of a set of social actors (such as individuals or organizations), sets of dyadic ties, and other social interactions between actors. The social network perspective provides a set of methods for ...

features. Since May 2008 Sugar has been developed under the umbrella of Sugar Labs, a member project of the

Software Freedom Conservancy Software Freedom Conservancy, Inc. is an organization that provides a non-profit home and infrastructure support for free and open source software projects. The organization was established in 2006, and as of June 2022, had over 40 member pr ...

. Some contributors are employed by One Laptop per Child and other related organizations, others are volunteers, in many cases associated with the

free software community The free software movement is a social movement with the goal of obtaining and guaranteeing certain freedoms for software users, namely the freedoms to run the software, to study the software, to modify the software, and to share copies of the s ...

. Contributors to the original Sugar platform included Marco Pesenti Gritti,

Walter Bender Walter Bender is a technologist and researcher who works in the field of electronic publishing, media and technology for learning. From the MIT Media Lab's founding 1985 through 2006, Bender directed the lab's Electronic Publishing Group. Previou ...

Christopher Blizzard Christopher Blizzard is a Developer Relations lead at Facebook. Formerly, he worked as an Open Source Evangelist at the Mozilla Corporation and has contributed to other open source projects, including Red Hat and One Laptop Per Child. Prior to ...

, Eben Eliason, Simon Schampijer, Christian Schmidt,

Lisa Strausfeld Lisa Strausfeld (born 1964 or 1965) is an American design professional and information architect. Education Strausfeld studied art history and computer science and earned a Bachelor of Arts at Brown University. She went on to study at Harvard U ...

, Takaaki Okada, Tomeu Vizoso, and Dan Williams.

Cross-platform

By early 2007 Sugar could be installed, with some difficulty, on several

Linux distribution A Linux distribution (often abbreviated as distro) is an operating system made from a software collection that includes the Linux kernel and, often, a package management system. Linux users usually obtain their operating system by downloading one ...

s, and in virtual machines on other operating systems. By mid-2008 Sugar was available on the

Debian Debian (), also known as Debian GNU/Linux, is a Linux distribution composed of free and open-source software, developed by the community-supported Debian Project, which was established by Ian Murdock on August 16, 1993. The first version of De ...

Ubuntu Ubuntu ( ) is a Linux distribution based on Debian and composed mostly of free and open-source software. Ubuntu is officially released in three editions: '' Desktop'', ''Server'', and ''Core'' for Internet of things devices and robots. All ...

, and

Fedora A fedora () is a hat with a soft brim and indented crown.Kilgour, Ruth Edwards (1958). ''A Pageant of Hats Ancient and Modern''. R. M. McBride Company. It is typically creased lengthwise down the crown and "pinched" near the front on both side ...

distributions of Linux; e.g., as of Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron), Sugar could be installed from the official Ubuntu universe repositories. By mid-2009 Sugar was also available on

openSUSE openSUSE () is a free and open source RPM-based Linux distribution developed by the openSUSE project. The initial release of the community project was a beta version of SUSE Linux 10.0. Additionally the project creates a variety of tools, s ...

and other Linux distributions. Sugar 0.82.1 was included in the OLPC system software release 8.2.0 for XO-1 laptops. Sugar 0.86 was released on September 30, 2009. Sugar 0.88 was released on March 31, 2010. Sugar 0.90.0 was released in October, 2010. There were three releases in 2011 and one in June 2012, which included support for the

ARM architecture ARM (stylised in lowercase as arm, formerly an acronym for Advanced RISC Machines and originally Acorn RISC Machine) is a family of reduced instruction set computer (RISC) instruction set architectures for computer processors, configured ...

on the XO 1.75. Builds for OLPC XO laptops and the release schedule are available at OS releases. Sugar has been ported to run on Android,

Firefox OS Firefox OS (project name: ''Boot to Gecko'', also known as ''B2G'') is a discontinued open-source operating system made for smartphones, tablet computers, smart TVs, and dongles designed by Mozilla and external contributors. It is based on the ...

and iOS using

HTML5 HTML5 is a markup language used for structuring and presenting content on the World Wide Web. It is the fifth and final major HTML version that is a World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) recommendation. The current specification is known as the HTML ...

and

JavaScript JavaScript (), often abbreviated as JS, is a programming language that is one of the core technologies of the World Wide Web, alongside HTML and CSS. As of 2022, 98% of websites use JavaScript on the client side for webpage behavior, of ...

under the project name "'' Sugarizer''"; with additional clients written for Web browsers supporting HTML5.

Sugar on a Stick

The Sugar learning platform for Linux is available as a

USB-bootable Linux distribution A live USB is a portable USB-attached external data storage device containing a full operating system that can be booted from. The term is reminiscent of USB flash drives but may encompass an external hard disk drive or solid-state drive, thou ...

("Sugar on a Stick" also known as "SoaS") and as software components forming an installable additional desktop environment for most Linux distributions. It can be installed using the Fedora Live USB Creator, and can be installed onto a computer hard disk using the liveinst command from a Sugar Terminal or console. On June 23, 2009, Sugar Labs announced the availability for download of Sugar on a Stick v1 Strawberry, which can run from a bootable 1 GB USB flash drive. On July 23, 2009, Recycle USB.com went live with a program to reflash used USB keys with the Sugar software and donate them to schools. On December 8, 2009, Sugar Labs announced the availability of Sugar on a Stick v2 Blueberry, which incorporates Sugar Release 0.86 and Fedora 11. Sugar Labs announced the availability of Sugar on a Stick v3 Mirabelle, which incorporates Sugar Release 0.88 and Fedora 13. Since Mirabelle, Sugar on a Stick has been a regular, semi-annual, Fedora Spin (official special-purpose version of Fedora); the a Spin using Fedora v22 was released on 26 May 2015.

XO-1 Usage

The

has a 1 GB NAND flash drive and 256 MB of memory. Because the flash-based hard drive is small, swap can only be added by using an SD card or a network block device. If too many activities are loaded at the same time there may be performance problems due to low memory or processor load.

Releases

XO releases

Sugar has had many XO releases.

Raspberry Pi releases

Sugar can be run on a Raspberry Pi. It is recommended to use SOAS to run Sugar on one. You can learn how to ru
Sugar on a Raspberry Pi
on Sugar Lab's website.

Sugar on a Stick releases

Strawberry

The Sugar on a Stick Strawberry release is based on Fedora 11 with the latest updates as of June 22, 2009. It features a Sugar learning environment, namely versio
0.84
including 40 Activities to enrich the learning experience. Hundreds of Activities are available for download from the Sugar activity library. This release includes

updates, Sugar features like ''View Source'' and file transfer, supplementary sample content, which is available in the Journal, and usability improvements.

Blueberry

Sugar on a Stick v2 Blueberry was released on 8 December 2009. It is based on F12 version of the Fedora operating system. It contains many features that improve the overall user and learning experience. Here is an overview of the most notable ones: * Sugar on a stick v2 Blueberry ships Sugar release
0.86.3
Its features are: *# Redesigned toolbars *# Better Gnash support for

Adobe Flash Adobe Flash (formerly Macromedia Flash and FutureSplash) is a multimedia software platform used for production of animations, rich web applications, desktop applications, mobile apps, mobile games, and embedded web browser video players. Flash ...

content *# Improved wireless networking *# Support for tabbed browsing *#

EPUB EPUB is an e-book file format that uses the ".epub" file extension. The term is short for ''electronic publication'' and is sometimes styled ''ePub''. EPUB is supported by many e-readers, and compatible software is available for most smartpho ...

file support for

e-books An ebook (short for electronic book), also known as an e-book or eBook, is a book publication made available in digital form, consisting of text, images, or both, readable on the flat-panel display of computers or other electronic devices. Alt ...

*# Easier keyboard-configuration *# Easy way to update to the latest activities * ZyX-LiveInstaller: # In high demand was a software to install Sugar to a hard disk. Hence Sugar teamed up the zyx-liveinstaller developer to provide: #* Seamless installation of the personalized environment into your computer's hard disk; #* It saves changes made to Sugar; #* It does not require boot again and again. * Activities # It includes updates to the standard collection of Activities for children and many new ones. An example is TamTam activity suite, which takes the user on a journey through Sound and Music.

Mirabelle

Mirabelle was the 3rd release of the Sugar on a Stick project. It was released on 25 May 2010. * Sugar versio
0.88
features: # Support for 3G connections # Increased accessibility # Better integration with activity portal * Sugar on a Stick is now a Fedora spin. After two prior releases of being based on Fedora Distribution, Sugar on a Stick has been recognized by Fedora Project as an official Spin. This ties us more closely to Fedora's release cycle and gives us resources from their engineering and marketing teams, which extends the reach of Sugar on a Stick and makes the project itself more sustainable. In exchange, users of Fedora have access to an easily deployable implementation of the Sugar Platform; it's a great example of a mutually beneficial upstream-downstream relationship. * Contributing to Sugar on a Stick – The biggest difference in v3 has been in its release processes and engineering sustainability;

Mango Lassi

Mango Lassi was the 4th version of Sugar on a Stick released on 2 November 2010. It uses the Sugar versio
0.90

Coconut

It is the 5th version of Sugar on a Stick released on 9 October 2011. It uses a Sugar versio
0.92

Pineapple

It is the 6th version of Sugar on a Stick released on 8 November 2011. It uses a Sugar versio
0.94.1

Quadong

It is the 7th version of Sugar on a Stick released on 29 May 2012. It uses a Sugar versio
0.96.1.

ʻŌhelo ʻai

It is the 8th version of Sugar on a Stick released on 15 January 2013. It uses a sugar versio
0.98.2

Avocado

It is the 9th version of Sugar on a Stick released on 2 July 2013. It uses a Sugar versio
0.98.8

10

It is the 10th version of Sugar on a Stick released on 17 December 2013. It uses a Sugar versio
0.100.0.

Later versions

Sugar has stopped giving official names to SoaS releases, however, it continues to create new versions for each Fedora release. The latest version of Sugar i
0.112
Sugar has released its latest versions for the latest Fedoras
Fedora 23Fedora 24Fedora 25Fedora 26
an
Fedora 27

Sugar on Various Operating Systems

Sugar is available preinstalled on several

operating systems and among the most notable ones:
Fedora Spin SoaS
An edition of Fedora with Sugar. It is also officially featured by The Sugar Project's Wiki on it
Sugar on a Stick (SoaS)
web page..
Trisquel Sugar Toast
An official edition of Trisquel GNU/Linux with Sugar. It i
recommended
by The Sugar Project as per 2020.

Screenshots

Image:Sugar-home-view-0.82.jpg, Sugar Home View File:OLPC-Frame.png, Neighborhood Image:OLPC-GUI Sugar-home view.jpg, Sugar Home View from pre-0.82 releases Image:OLPC-mesh network-friends view.jpg, Sugar "Friends" View Image:Pippy.png, Sugar Pippy activity view. Image:XO-sugar.png, Sugar Home View with Frame from pre-0.82 releases Image:Sugar-viewsource.png, Sugar View Source Image:Sugar-journal.png, Sugar Journal

Sugarizer

Sugarizer is an

HTML The HyperText Markup Language or HTML is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It can be assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and scripting languages such as JavaS ...

and

based application that allows for using Sugar functionality on any device. It is available as both a

web application A web application (or web app) is application software that is accessed using a web browser. Web applications are delivered on the World Wide Web to users with an active network connection. History In earlier computing models like client-serv ...

and a

mobile app A mobile application or app is a computer program or software application designed to run on a mobile device such as a phone, tablet, or watch. Mobile applications often stand in contrast to desktop applications which are designed to run on d ...

. It offers a similar user interface and includes features of Sugar Core (datastore and journal), as well as many of the same Sugar activities.

References

Some material was copied from wiki.sugarlabs.org, which is available under
Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY 3.0) license

External links

*
Sugar-on-a-Stick operating system

Sugar for Raspberry Pi
* XO releases
Sugarizer
{{X desktop environments and window managers Desktop environments based on GTK Educational operating systems Free and open-source Android software Free desktop environments IOS software Live USB One Laptop per Child Linux-based devices