Compile Sugar on Debian Testing (wheezy)

I’ve been trying to compile Sugar on Debian Testing since a week ago. I chat with some guys on #sugar (irc.freenode.net) looking for help and solving some bugs related with dependencies: #3364, #3365, #3370 and #3372.

After these two weeks, we found the solution to those issues and we discover another ones. I was helped by silbe to compile Sugar on Debian Testing. He helped me a lot fixing some missing dependencies that I found and guiding me to the solution; telling me about what .log file to take a look for example.

I think that Sugar has a blocking bar to start coding. I’m a developer, I don’t know too much about jhbuild and I think that I shouldn’t fight against it. Sometimes this blocking bar is sufficient to lost a good developer that tries to collaborate but he can’t cross that bar, so maybe he goes for another project.

O.K., let’s go to the really steps to compile Sugar on a Debian Testing installation:

1. Download the sugar-jhbuild source code

git clone git://git.sugarlabs.org/sugar-jhbuild/mainline.git sugar-jhbuild

2. Update the sugar code

cd sugar-jhbuild
./sugar-jhbuild update

3. Now, you need to check what dependencies are missing in your system

./sugar-jhbuild depscheck

4. Install all Debian packages listed bydepscheck command

sudo apt-get install <all-packages-listed-by-depscheck>

NOTE:You need to apply a patch on the libgconf2-4 package. So, we have to download the libgconf source package and apply that patch.

5. Download the source

mkdir /tmp/src-libgconf2-4
cd /tmp/src-libgconf2-4
apt-get source libgconf2-4

6. Install building dependencies

sudo apt-get build-dep libgconf2-4

6. Download and apply the patch

cd gconf-3.2.3
wget -c http://bugzilla-attachments.gnome.org/attachment.cgi?id=201398 -O gconf.patch
git apply gconf.patch --verbose

7. Create the .deb packages

dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot -b
cd ..

8. Install .deb packages

sudo dpkg -i *.deb

9. Build Sugar

cd <your-sugar-jhbuild-directory>
./sugar-jhbuild build

10. Runsugar-emulator

./sugar-jhbuild run sugar-emulator

That’s all! Two weeks of work summarized in one single post with 10 simple steps!!!

Yes! Now I can collaborate with this project. It’s really interesting; I was working some years ago on the OLPC project, and it was cool. This time I found that the GUI and the activities grew a lot! I’m happy with that.

Here are the references that I used to compile sugar: