Live CD

<< Emulating the XO

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A LiveCD is an bootable medium which has an operating system executed upon boot without installing to internal storage. It provides a method for a user to try out a new operating system without making any permanent changes. LiveCDs are generally distributed as .iso images. The .iso images are downloaded and then burned onto a CD-ROM, copied to a prepared USB key, or installed on a virtual machine.

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

Current efforts

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.

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.

LiveBackup LiveCDs

• Maintainers: Wolfgang Rohrmoser and Kurt Gramlich
• Downloads: http://dev.laptop.org/pub/livebackupcd
• Source and Mirror
• Description: LiveBackup based version of an official OLPC image. Currently available image is based on build-689. For more Information see LiveBackup XO-LiveCD
• The Project is hosted at git
• [http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/devel/2008-March/012024.html Announcement Version 080321|
• Announcement Version 080130
• First Announcement

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.

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.