Installing Fedora Core

Overview

This page describes how to install Fedora Core on the One Laptop per Child hardware using a USB Hard Disk Drive. As of the writing of this document, the A-Test boards have been built and distributed to several hundred people.

Requirements

Hardware

You will need a few pieces of hardware to install the software on the A-Test board.

• 1 A-Test (or pre-A-Test) OLPC board
• 1 USB hard drive
• 1 USB ethernet adapter
• 1 external VGA-compatible monitor for display
• 1 USB keyboard
• 1 USB mouse
• 1 powered USB hub

Why you need the powered USB hub

• The board only has 3 USB ports, and there are 5 USB peripherals involved.
• But even if you are only using 3 USB peripherals, you still might need a powered hub, because the board's internal power converters are wimpy (to reduce cost and prolong battery life).

Download

Get an OS image from http://olpc.download.redhat.com/olpc/streams/development/latest/devel_ext3/. You want the ".img.bz2" file, for example:

olpc-redhat-stream-development-build-86-20060922_1506-devel_ext3.img.bz2 

Installing

Follow the directions at [OS_images_for_USB_disks], under the "Dedicated USB disk" section.

Enlarging the Partition

Since the OLPC OS images are 512MB (to fit the onboard flash), but you are installing them to a larger drive. Therefore we must enlarge the partition. Once you have transferred the image to the USB device (the 'dd' step), and synced all disks (the 'sync' step), start the fdisk tool as root, like so:

fdisk /dev/sda

Be sure to replace '/dev/sda' with the actual device name of the USB Hard Disk Drive on which you are installing the OLPC OS.