Emulating the XO
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In the past, OLPC produced alternative software images which could be run in emulators such as QEMU and VMware. This meant that development and testing could happen to a limited extent without requiring an XO laptop.
In 2013, please see Tom Gilliard's many virtual machine images ready-to-go.
Note, XOs are readily available to genuine volunteer contributors through the Contributors program.
Sugar, the unique user interface of the XO laptops, is also distributed as a generic software project and can be developed and tested on "regular" computers as well as XOs. See Sugar Labs Downloads for the full range of options, such as Sugar on a Stick.
For emulation of extremely old builds, you may be able to come across "ext3 images" on some corners of http://download.laptop.org and http://xs-dev.laptop.org/~cscott/olpc/streams/ which can be loaded into emulators. You are unlikely to find support for them!