Sugar-Coated Fedora LiveCD Gives A Taste of the OLPC XO

Last Thursday, the OLPC Special Interest Group (SIG) announced the availability of the Fedora Sugar Spin LiveCD. This release incorporates the Sugar Desktop Environment in to a Fedora liveCD.

It's an easy way to try out the Sugar environment and associated applications without touching your existing system.

The OLPC SIG plans to bring more Sugar application adaptations to Fedora eventually, through the traditional YUM installation procedure. At this point, the Fedora Sugar team has a base set of packages available for Fedora 10 (in rawhide) and reports that the 'yum groupinstall sugar-desktop' should successfully install the desktop environment to traditional desktop installations.

The live disk image incorporates Sugar-Browse (based on XULRunner) and Sugar-Write (based on AbiWord) as well as support for chat and several other applications.

It's interesting to watch Sugar spread from the OLPC XO laptop and appear in several major distributions. Aside from encouraging wider development, it opens up a very targeted environment and platform to an audience of users who might never consider an OLPC machine.