¶ Setup a development environment

Sugar is made of several modules and depends on many other libraries.

There are several ways to set up a Sugar environment for doing Sugar development, choose one at a time only;

for testing or changing Sugar or a Sugar activity, install a live build, which has all dependencies and source code included, but is nearly 1GB of downloads;
for writing or changing a Sugar activity, install a packaged Sugar environment, which will install dependencies automatically; or,
for packaging Sugar, downstream developers create a native Sugar build and install the necessary dependencies by hand, but Sugar is difficult to remove.

¶ Sugar Live Build

Sugar Live Build is a complete bootable image containing Sugar, the toolkits, and the demonstration activities;

can be booted from hard drive, flash drive, and optical media, automatically starting Sugar without persistence,
can be installed as a virtual machine, with persistence and password protection,
contains all build dependencies, configured source trees (git clones in /usr/src), and binaries (make install) for Sugar modules and the demonstration activity set.

See downloads for the ISO9660 image file.

Once installed, Sugar Live Build can be used to make changes to Sugar, the toolkits, the demonstration activities, or to write new activities.

changes to Sugar or the toolkits can be done by editing files in the module source trees in /usr/src, followed by sudo make install for each changed module.
changes to demonstration activities can be done in the activity source trees in /usr/src/sugar-activities, and are immediately effective; just start a new instance of the activity in Sugar.
writing new activities can be done in the ~/Activities/ directory, and the new activity can be started using sugar-activity command in Terminal, or by restarting Sugar so that the new activity/activity.info file is read to regenerate the Home View.

See sugar-live-build on GitHub for configuration files to make your own Sugar Live Build using the Debian Live Build software.

¶ Packaged Sugar

For development of activities without making changes to Sugar desktop.

For Fedora users, see Using Sugar on Fedora. Once Sugar is installed, development of activities can begin.

For Debian users, see also Using Sugar on Debian, or see how to install sucrose below.

For Ubuntu users, see also Using Sugar on Ubuntu, or see how to install sucrose below.

Install Debian Stretch or Buster, or Ubuntu 17.10 Artful.

Install the sucrose package;

sudo apt install sucrose

Log out, then log in with the Sugar desktop selected.

Or, install xrdp and rdesktop then log in to Sugar in a window;

sudo apt install xrdp rdesktop
sudo adduser guest
echo sugar | sudo tee -a /home/guest/.xsession
rdesktop -g 1200x900 -u guest -p guest 127.0.0.1

Once you have a local Sugar desktop, or a remote Sugar desktop, development of activities can begin.

¶ Native Sugar

For experts.

Clone each of the module repositories;

for module in sugar{-datastore,-artwork,-toolkit,-toolkit-gtk3,}; do
    git clone https://github.com/sugarlabs/$module.git
done

Install the build dependencies. There are many, and their package names vary by distribution. A good list is in the Debian or Fedora packaging files.

On Debian or Ubuntu;

for module in sugar{-datastore,-artwork,-toolkit,-toolkit-gtk3,}; do
    apt build-dep $module
done

On Fedora, use dnf builddep, like this; (If you are using GNOME's desktop environment, make sure you are using GNOME Xorg before moving forward!)

for module in sugar{-datastore,-artwork,-toolkit,-toolkit-gtk3,}; do
    dnf builddep $module
done

Autogen, configure, make, and install each module;

for module in sugar{-datastore,-artwork,-toolkit,-toolkit-gtk3,}; do
    cd $module
    ./autogen.sh
    ./configure
    make
    sudo make install
    cd ..
done

Clone the Browse and Terminal activities;

mkdir -p ~/Activities
cd ~/Activities
git clone https://github.com/sugarlabs/browse-activity.git Browse.activity
git clone https://github.com/sugarlabs/terminal-activity.git Terminal.activity

Log out and log in again with the Sugar desktop selected, or use the remote desktop feature described earlier on this page.

After making changes in a Sugar module, repeat the sudo make install step, and log in again.