Emulating the XO/Mac Parallels3

Step by step instructions for getting XO emulation up on a Mac using Parallels v3

• 

  Create a new virtual machine.

• 

  Specify Custom OS.

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  Select Other Linux.

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  Specify 256MB RAM.

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  Create new (empty) 1GB hard disk.

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  Specify 1GB plain disk.

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  Choose networking option.

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  Name the virtual machine OLPC.

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  Optimize performance for VM.

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  Uncheck Start Other Linux installation.

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  (blank) 1GB HD image is created.

Quit Parallels, since so far we only have a blank disk image. Take a look at it.

$ ls -l ${HOME}/Documents/Parallels/OLPC/otherlin.hdd/*.hds
-rw-r--r--  ... 1073995776 Jan  3 00:30 .../otherlin.hdd.0.{some-parallels-hex-code}.hds

I use a script to copy an XO image onto the blank 1GB disk just created.

$ cat ~/bin/mk-otherlin-olpc
#!/bin/bash

# edit these to match your system
IND=/Users/gknauth/test/olpc
INF=xo-1-olpc-stream-joyride-build-1492-20080102_2219-devel_ext3.img.bz2
OUTD=/Users/gknauth/Documents/Parallels/OLPC/otherlin.hdd
OUTF='otherlin.hdd.0.{some-parallels-hex-code}.hds'

bzcat "$IND/$INF" | dd "of=$OUTD/$OUTF" bs=1024 conv=notrunc,noerror,sync

Invoke the script.

$ ~/bin/mk-otherlin-olpc
949840+1 records in
949841+0 records out
972637184 bytes transferred in 190.564697 secs (5103974 bytes/sec)

I am glad that the number of bytes transferred is less than the size of the hard disk I created. If that had not been the case, I would later get a Grub Error 18 (selected cylinder exceeds maximum supported by BIOS).

$ ls -l ${HOME}/Documents/Parallels/OLPC/otherlin.hdd/*.hds
-rw-r--r-- ... 1073995776 Jan  3 00:40 .../otherlin.hdd.0.{some-parallels-hex-code}.hds

Now that we have a real XO image copied over to our hard disk, we can start Parallels again.

• 

  Select OLPC VM to run.

• 

  Start OLPC VM.

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  OLPC VM begins to boot.

• 

  OLPC VM is booting.

• 

  Enter your name.

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  Your OLPC is running.

• 

  Trusty terminal.

At this point, there is no networking. What I want to do is the following:

$ sudo bash
# ifup eth0

However ifup eth0 is failing for me. I still mention it because it seems to have worked for most other people. Try different networking options when initially creating the Parallels virtual machine.

Some of the suggestions I pursued, such as creating an empty hard disk and then using a dd command that does not truncate the image, came from BruceB and ScottSwanson at Emulating_the_XO/Mac.