I updated my son’s XO laptop to the latest firmware 767 yesterday.  Reflashing the base system was surprisingly easy, but I found ‘sugarizing’ apps to be a bit more labor intensive.  To ‘sugarize’ an app is to place an app icon in the graphical interface called Sugar ( pictured left ).  Although the OLPC wiki has lots of sugarized apps available, OLPC’s Sugar is a branch of Fedora linux and can run a vast array of linux apps – from the command line.  Not so cool for a 7 year old.

I started poking around for a Sugar VM and found a few, but stumbled upon a gem called Sugar-on-a-Stick (SoAS).  This project packages up Sugar into a bootable USB flash drive allowing you to experiment with the OLPC operating system and user interface on the go.  Just what I needed.  The whole process took under 30 minutes, and now I have a 1 GB flash disk with a fully funcational OLPC installation to tinker with.  I have managed to install Skype on my son’s OLPC and sugarize the app so he can point’n’click to use – worked out the trial and error of this entire process on my sugar-on-a-stick.  The disk image and installation instructions can be found at the SoAS wiki.