Scratch and Arduino on Linux

At CoderDojo we have the luck to receive old laptops from companies. We use them for kids who don’t have a laptop or can’t bring one to the Dojo’s. For security reasons these laptops sometimes are compleltely erased or reinstalled with a new OS without license. Therefor we use them with Linux Ubuntu.

As always with Linux - says a Windows guy ;-) - it’s sometimes a pain in the *** to get everything running as expected. Therefor my personal cheat sheet to get Scratch, Arduino and S4A running on them.

• Download a recent Linux Ubuntu and burn it on a cd-rom

• Boot the laptop with it and install Linux

• Ater Linux is OK, download the following into the download directory:

  • http://scratch.mit.edu/scratch2download/
  • AIR 2.6 for linux
  • Scratch 2 installer

• S4A

  • http://s4a.cat/

• Install Arduino ID

  • CTRL + ALT + T
  • sudo apt-get update
  • sudo apt-get install arduino arduino-core

• Install AIR and offline Scratch 2

  • CTRL + ALT + T
  • sudo -i
  • give the password
  • locate libgnome-keyring.so
  • cd /home/USERNAME/Downloads/
  • chmod +x AdobeAirInstaller.bin
  • LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu ./AdobeAIRInstaller.bin
  • nautilus
  • in opened window double click “Scratch.air”

• S4A installeren

  • open file browser (not as root)
  • double click S4A15.deb in the downloads

• Make sure the user rights are OK for the serial port for Arduino

  • CTRL + ALT + T
  • sudo usermod -a -G dialout USERNAME
  • restart computer

• Test if Arduino works

  • open “Arduino IDE”
  • let the permission checker do its work
  • attach an Arduino Board and upload an example script

More shared Arduino information of CoderDojo Belgium on this link: http://tinyurl.com/cdjbe-arduino

And if you do it enough, you can do several at the same time (with a glass of wine)