As I pointed out recently, open-source software in schools isn’t just a good idea, it’s becoming a financial necessity if we’re to keep enough teachers for our kids in classrooms. So, it’s particular good timing that Sugar Labs and openSUSE have released free Linux distributions expressly designed for education.

Sugar Labs, for those of you who don’t know them, is a software non-profit spin off from the OLPC (One Laptop per Child). Sugar Labs provides the Sugar desktop interface, which runs in turn, on top of a version of Fedora 10.

On June 24th, at LinuxTag in Berlin, Germany, Sugar Labs announced the immediate availability of Sugar on a Stick v1 Strawberry. As the name indicates, Sugar on a Stick is a live USB flash drive distribution. It requires at least a GB-sized drive. With it, you can boot Sugar on any PC. It was designed to work on older PCs, netbooks, and other low-end hardware. You can also run Sugar with the provided virtual machine software on both Intel-based Macs Windows PCs.

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