XO Development: Running Sugar on a Mac

The XO laptop runs a custom version of Linux with drivers and libraries for the fancy hardware and an impressive simple user interface called Sugar. For getting a sense of what it's like, or for developing applications that don't necessarily need the fancy hardware, you can run the XO operating system in an emulator. The general recommendation is to use Qemu, a free PC emulator for several operating systems, with the latest image.

I couldn't get build 625 (the latest as of this writing) to work with the Mac port of Qemu, called "Q": I could create my user account, but then X would crash and restart repeatedly. I had a similar-looking issue using the 625 build directly with Parallels 3.0 and this old technique of creating an empty VM and replacing its hard drive with the .img file (already reported not to work with recent builds).

Thankfully, Bert Freudenberg got it working it Parallels and offers build 623 as a Parallels VM. It works great, and anyone with Parallels Desktop, an Intel Mac and the interest should download the VM and give it a whirl.

For serious Sugar Activity (application) development, a good option for Mac users with Parallels is to create a VM and install Fedora Linux: Download an install DVD ISO image and tell Parallels 3.0 that you want to install the OS from the image when Parallels asks. I had a weird issue where the first time 'round it couldn't find an obvious .rpm file on the image, but stopping the VM, setting the options to boot from the "CD" image again, and restarting the installation procedure finished it fine.

Once Fedora is set up, run these commands to install a few more packages, and don't forget the final sudo yum install popt-devel if you're running Fedora 8. My Fedora 8 install didn't give my user account sudoers access by default, so I just jumped to superuser mode with su then ran those commands. Also, there have been 137+ package updates since Fedora 8, so expect the first sudo yum -y update to take a while.

Once all the packages are installed, proceed to these instructions for using sugar-jhbuild. The result is not the full XO software suite—not all of the XO's default applications are part of the default developer source for Sugar—but it's enough to get started with developing Sugar apps.

More XO emulation options. More Sugar options, including running Sugar on Mac OS X native, which sounds tricky, provides no advice for running PyGTK on a Mac (I assume X11 is involved), and even includes a little diatribe at the end on how setting up a development environment ought to be easier.