LiveBackup XO-LiveCD

The contents of this page are considered outdated and some of the information may be stale. Please use information here with caution, or update it.

This is a Live CD built from an OLPC ext3 OS image.

Project goals

• give children, students, teachers and parents the opportunity to participate and use the educational software on a common PC
• support demonstration of OLPC software to non-developers
• for developers the CD provides an easy maintainable Live system, which could be used to develop and test activities on the Sugar desktop

Please give feedback via mailing list

http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/livebackup-xo-cd

Press Information

http://www.olpcnews.com/software/operating_system/sugar_on_classmate_pc.html

http://futurezone.orf.at/hardcore/stories/268610/ (german)

http://www.linux-user.de/ausgabe/2008/04/024/ (german)

XO-LiveCD Versions

Release Version 2009-12-03

ftp://rohrmoser-engineering.de/pub/XO-LiveCD/XO-LiveCD_091203.iso

    - still based on build 8.2.1
    - activitiy updates
    - kernel 2.6.31 for better hardware support

Release Version 2009-03-08

ftp://rohrmoser-engineering.de/pub/XO-LiveCD/XO-LiveCD_090308.iso

Mirror:

http://www.skolelinux.de/XO-LiveCD/

Release Version 2008-12-01

ftp://rohrmoser-engineering.de/pub/XO-LiveCD/XO-LiveCD_081201.iso

Other versions are available by browsing the parent directory.

This release is based on the ext3 image of the stable 8.2 branch, build 767 (release 8.2.0). The CD contains many activities, including all G1G1 activities.

Main features:

• latest stable version of the Sugar desktop
• large and customizable collection of activities
• expandable language support, already included are German, French, and Spanish languages.

Read the release notes.

Release Version 2008-09-19

ftp://rohrmoser-engineering.de/pub/XO-LiveCD/

and mirrored at

• http://www.skolelinux.de/XO-LiveCD/

The ISO images at the official repository are out of date and only have version 080607 of 2008-06-07:

• http://dev.laptop.org/pub/livebackupcd

A special edition (german) for Linuxtag 2008 in Berlin

http://www.skolelinux.de/XO-LiveCD/XO-LiveCD_Linuxtag2008.iso

Main features and changes since version 080321

• Dual boot option for update.1 and joyride builds. You can try out the new SUGAR design by booting a recent OLPC joyride version.
• Improved CD customization. Additional activities and RPM packages can be installed by putting them into CD top-level directories.
• A new script to prepare USB boot devices out of the Live-ISO image.
• Tested on a wide range of PC and laptop hardware and proved to work with all common virtual machines on Windows, MacOS and Linux.
• Additional Xorg graphic drivers and improved X11 auto-configuration tools.
• Bug fixes, updates and new activities.
• Linux kernel 2.6.24.7, using the aufs-filesystem.

Main features and changes since version 080130:

• the CD is based on OLPC development build 695
• better hardware support, based on linux kernel 2.6.24.3
• based on LiveBackup Version 1.4.3
• initial ASUS EeePC support (alpha)
• new bootsplash and improved boot-error handling
• playing chess and simulation of electronic circuits now works with gcompris
• bug fixes, updates and new extra activities

Main features and changes since the initial version 071206:

• the CD is based on OLPC development build 689
• during startup you can choose between English, Spanish, French or German language/keyboard settings.
• the Live-CD has an automated installation of additional (beta) activities. Depending on available RAM size you will get some or all of:

BlockParty-7.xo, CartoonBuilder-RC-1.7.xo, FlipSticks-RC-1.4.xo, Implode-2.xo, JigsawPuzzle-1_20071030.xo, Jump-1.xo, Maze-3.xo, Simcity-4.xo, SliderPuzzle-3_20071030.xo, Speak-3.xo, StopWatchActivity-1.xo, StoryBuilder-11.xo, branches-stable-ImageQuiz.activity-ImageQuiz.xo, gcompris.activity.xo

• the documentation has a new chapter about system installation on harddisk and configuration of a multiboot setup.

Emulation

You can run the CD image in an emulator using the -cdrom image_name.iso parameter. The minimal system requirements to start the XO-LiveCD without modifications (you may press F1 in the boot screen to read more) is 512 MB of RAM. So a command to load the CD image in QEMU is, roughly,

cd qemu directory
qemu.exe -L . -m 512 -kernel-kqemu -soundhw es1370 
  -net user -net nic,model=rtl8139 -cdrom XO-LiveCD_081106.iso

Even using the kqemu accelerator, the performance using QEMU on Windows is slow. You may find VirtualBox on Windows does a better job.