Live CD

<< Emulating the XO

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A LiveCD is a bootable medium which has an operating system that can run upon boot; you don't need to install it to internal storage. It lets a user to try out a new operating system without making any permanent changes. LiveCDs are generally distributed as .iso (ISO 9660) images. You download the .iso image and then burn it to a CD-ROM using a program that can create a CD from a file (note that MS Windows XP cannot do this natively, please do not copy an ISO image .iso file to CD; it's not what you want), or copy it to a prepared USB key, or install it on a virtual machine.

Several efforts are underway to create a liveCD emulating the XO and the Sugar environment.

Various efforts

In general, Live CDs either take an OLPC build (based on Fedora) and create a Live CD, or take a Linux distribution's LiveCD machinery and add Sugar packages.

LiveBackup XO-LiveCDs

This is based on the OLPC ext3 build image

• Download from ftp://rohrmoser-engineering.de/XO-LiveCD or mirror
  • Earlier builds at http://dev.laptop.org/pub/livebackupcd
• Maintainers: Wolfgang Rohrmoser and Kurt Gramlich
• Description: official OLPC image turned into a Live CD using the LiveBackup framework.
• For more Information see LiveBackup XO-LiveCD
• The project is hosted in git
• Announcements
  • Version 8.2
  • Version 080321
  • Version 080130
  • First version 071206

These LiveCDs allow you to convert a "regular" machine into a Sugar-running machine without touching the hard disk of the machine. This allows you to play with and test how the software runs with your hardware. It also lets you demonstrate and potentially test your software (at full speed).

It is also possible to use this type of LiveCD to create a "virtual Sugar lab" for a school, where a traditional computer lab's computers are booted into a Sugar environment, storing their data on a networked or other storage device, without changing the lab's installed software. (How? Link would be appreciated)

Sbuntu

"Sugar for Ubuntu" Live USB. This is a customization of a Ubuntu 8.04.1 LiveCD to make it boot into Sugar. For more information see http://dev.laptop.org/~probono/sbuntu/

Sugar-jhbuild Live CD

See sugar:Live CD on http://sugarlabs.org.

• Download
• Maintainer Guy Sheffer

Other Sugar LiveCDs

See "Starch" complete disk images on http://sugarlabs.org.

XUbuntu Gutsy LiveCD

• Download: http://startx.ro/sugar/
• Annoucement.

A XUbuntu LiveCD with the Sugar Ubuntu package (with installation capability and launch-from-USB-key). Allows you to run Sugar directly on the hardware with an XUbuntu environment as well. A full working Live-CD with a recent build is available.

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=670171 has further discussion.

Fedora Sugar Spin

Notes: Sebastian Dziallas reports that there is a Sugar spin based on Fedora available here:

http://alt.fedoraproject.org/pub/alt/olpc/0.82/i686/sugar-spin.iso

Please be aware of the fact that the link above has changed recently - the old one won't work anymore! For more information, please see this post: https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-olpc-list/2008-November/msg00003.html

With this spin, you'll be able to run Sugar, which is developed by Sugarlabs and the desktop environment used on the OLPC, directly from a Live CD! You'll find several activities on the image including most notably...

• sugar-browse - a web browsing activity based on xulrunner
• sugar-write - a word processor based on abiword

...among with several other applications introducing e.g. chat support.

The OLPC SIG, will be importing further activities into Fedora, which might be installed using yum install sugar-* at a later time.

The SHA1 checksum is, if you're interested:

f032ab45aa116c2728dcd2d676e29a5ee114fd1d sugar-spin.iso

What if you wanted to put it quickly onto your USB Key? You'll just need to grab Luke Macken's liveusb-creator, which already includes support for the Sugar Spin. Here's the link:

https://fedorahosted.org/releases/l/i/liveusb-creator/liveusb-creator-3.0.zip

The liveusb-creator still contains the old link, which is the reason why you'll need to download the spin manually until this gets fixed.

Thank you everybody, who made this possible!

Pilgrim Fedora LiveCD

A Fedora Pilgrim LiveCD with the official image pre-downloaded and configured to run in Qemu with KQemu. Allows you to run the image from the standard Fedora desktop inside an emulator.

OLPC XO-1 LiveCD (obsolete)

Note:

The LiveCD has not been updated since early April 2007. Much which now works, was not even started back then. The maintainers seem to have abandoned it. Greg DeKoenigsberg took a look at another way to automatically generate LiveCDs in a recent blog post, but this is apparently still a work-in-progress.

Until someone starts maintaining this again, it looks like the best way is to go with other LiveCDs listed above, or work with the XO software is via emulation

Download (right-click and 'Save Link as') olpc-redhat-stream-sdk-livecd.iso. You can check when the file was last updated here.

The LiveCD may not boot off an external optical-drive connected via USB.

Ivan Krstić wrote:

All our builds, including LiveCD ones, are built using the pilgrim tool:

    http://gitweb.freedesktop.org/?p=users/david/pilgrim.git

That's where you want to start investigating if you're interested in mastering your own.

External links

• Remastering OLPC livecd. Ivan Krstić. 2007-01-15.