OS images

Definition

OLPC and Red Hat continually develop the Fedora-derived OLPC Linux operating system. Each day, we freeze the most up-to-date version of that OS, and make it available for download as an OS image.

Downloads

As the operating system for OLPC is under development, there are several builds available. The latest build might not always be stable since developers are experimenting with new features. Each build is labeled with a unique version number. When reporting problems on mailing lists, please make sure you list the build number you are using.

You can download the latest images from:

http://olpc.download.redhat.com/olpc/streams/development

Latest Stable Build

A build is marked "stable" when the developers are happy with a build. At minimum, a stable build will meet the criterion:

• USB image on A test board with Insyde BIOS
• NAND image on A test board with Insyde BIOS, booting via USB and kexec'ing into a kernel loaded from NAND (select OLPC NAND in grub on the USB stick)
• QEMU image
• USB image for A test board with LinuxBIOS
• NAND flash image for A test board with LinuxBIOS

A stable build does not mean everything is working, nor that it is actually "stable." For example, for a while Sugar and X were both broken in a stable build, but virtual consoles worked fine and that was enough to get work done for most developers. Casual downloader and those upgrading to a new build beware: check the mailing list to see whether there are known problems before selecting a build.

The latest stable build is build91.

Image variants

Images are available in four variants

• Normal images in the ext3/ and jffs2/ sub-directories
  • Intended for production use
  • Does not contain tools or software suitable for developers of the OLPC operating system
  • The ext3/ images are intended for USB drives (both hard drives and flash drives)
  • The jffs2/ images are intended for the on-board NAND flash.

• Developer images, in the devel_ext3/ and devel_jffs2/ sub-directories
  • Contains tools useful for developers of the OLPC operating system, including: yum, rpm, vim-minimal, openssh-server, xterm, which, file, tree, wget, xorg-x11-twm, gdb packages
  • The devel_ext3/ images are intended for USB drives (both hard drives and flash drives)
  • The devel_jffs2/ images are intended for the on-board NAND flash
  • WARNING: Do not attempt to update the kernel on devel_* builds - the initrd will be wrong. We're working on fixing this through including an olpc-mkinitrd package.

Each variant may have available in two sub-variants:

• tree: a tarball of the OS directory tree, without a filesystem
• img: a filesystem image (of one of the types described above).

Using Images

For development we right now offer images that runs the OLPC operating system off a USB storage device. We're working on getting this to work on the NAND flash of the hardware too. Instructions to come.

Passwords

The images have no password set at build time. This means you can log in as root using no password. Always remember to change the password as the first thing when start using an image.

As the image-rpm variant ships with an SSH server you thus need to set the password to be able to login from a remote host. This is a feature of sshd.

Password handling is subject to change before official release.

Images on a USB disk

The OS images for USB disks page describes how to write these images to a USB disk, so that you can test the images on real OLPC hardware, or attempt to boot from them on your own PC.

Images on an emulator

The OS images for emulation page details how you can run the OS images on a normal PC, without the OLPC hardware.

Images with the on-board NAND flash on OLPC hardware

See the Installing_to_NAND page.

Wireless

Tested with Build 76 by Quozl and JvC on OLPC hardware. Verified it still works on Build 81 by Scytacki. rminnich just tested and build 83 works.

• attach antennae (so as to prevent damage)
• obtain the firmware file usb8388_A1_W8015FP14_FW2.bin from https://www.marvell.com/drivers/driverDisplay.do?dId=160&pId=38
• rename the file to /lib/firmware/usb8388.bin
• reboot

The result was that eth0 appeared in ifconfig, and the browser was able to access google.com, thanks to the automatic network configuration.

If you need to setup specific Essids or Keys, look at /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifup-wireless for documentation, and add appropriate variables to ifcfg-eth0.

Mesh wireless

There is new firmware with mesh routing support: https://www.marvell.com/drivers/driverDisplay.do?dId=164&pId=38