F11 for XO-1

OLPC is developing a new Fedora based XO operating system for both the XO-1 and the XO-1.5, see (F11 for 1.5) for the XO-1.5 hardware revision. It includes various improvements and modernizations over the last released version (release 8.2.1 on 2009-05-13) for the XO-1 hardware shipped to many deployments and G1G1 donors.

Community-developed builds

The builds for the XO-1 are maintained by Steven M. Parrish

The builds for the XO-1.5 are maintained by Chris Ball & Daniel Drake.

Current release: OS8

This build was released October 15th, 2009 and includes:

Updates to insure that all Sugar Activities are compatible with release 0.84 of Sugar.

Fix a problem in the repository definitions which caused "yum updates" to fail.

A new kernel plus numerous package updates.

Replaces Firefox with Midori for web browsing.

Builds can be downloaded here.

The usual cautions apply:

• This is development code
• You will need to request a developer key
• You need to know how to issue firmware commands (OFW FAQ is one starting point)
• There will be bugs!

Installation instructions

Before you start, be sure you know can install the latest released XO software image from a thumb drive. Print out the instructions, download the files, and install it for practice. If the software below has any bugs -- and it will -- you might need to go back to the released image.

Get a developer key for your XO, install it, and disable security. Read and understand http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Developer_key

You do have a backup copy of your developer signature and the latest released XO software image stored safely on another computer right? What about all the files you created on your XO? They will all be erased!

Format your thumb drive as a FAT drive. Copy the os8.crc and os8.img files to the thumb drive.

Boot your XO and as soon as you hear the chimes, press the Escape key (at the upper left, marked )

You should see a firmware prompt, which looks like this: ok

At the firmware prompt, use copy-nand to install os8.img with os8.crc, overwriting your XO-1's files.

to do so you have to issue the following command at the ok OFW prompt:

probe-usb copy-nand disk:\osN.img 

where N is the number of the .img you dowloaded and having in mind that your USB key has to have the .crc file in the same location of the .img file.

When it completes, turn off the XO (hold power button) and remove the thumb drive, then hit the power button to start again. (It might take a long time to start up the first time, and it might take a few tries to start up completely. You might want to boot with more detail shown: If you hold down the "Check" key (with a ✓ check-mark on it, the rightmost of the four keys in the game pad to the right of the screen), then you'll get a "Check Boot" which is significantly more verbose.

You may be able to use Live USB techniques to create a bootable USB from os8.iso

Earlier builds

See http://dev.laptop.org/~dsd/f11-xo1/

Notes on how to create XO-1 builds

People presumably are following these steps to create.

Here's how you might do it:

Prerequisites: Fedora 11 system, with sudo access and a decent amount of disk space.

yum install git livecd-tools mtd-utils crcimg

As your regular user, check out fedora-xo:

git clone git://dev.laptop.org/projects/fedora-xo

In this git tree:

• master branch is currently unused.
• xo-1.5 branch contains all build scripts for the new OS release for the XO-1.5.
• xo-1 branch contains all build scripts for the for the XO-1

git checkout --track -b xo-1 origin/xo-1

As a quick summary of the most important files,

olpc-base.ks and olpc-desktop.ks

the kickstart files used to make the core software image.

livecd-creator

processes the core software files to create a .iso image.

livecd-iso-to-xo.sh

converts that .iso into an image that can be flashed onto XOs.

Makefile

wraps up the whole process.

The ongoing process will be to synchronize the xo-1 branch with any new changes made to the xo-1.5 branch. Really, there are only a few differences that must be maintained between the 2 branches. You can see these differences with this command:

git diff 38951c7..xo-1

The above command shows the state of the XO-1.5 branch at the point of last synchronization compared to the XO-1 branch. The differences that have to be maintained (for example, geode video driver, jffs2 file-system) can be seen here, but even this was an unclean synchronization and could be made cleaner (there is some "noise" in the diff).

The next step is to look at all of the recent changes that have been made to xo-1.5 and merge them into xo-1. I would do this by comparing the 2 trees as follows:

git diff xo-1 origin/xo-1.5

Your task is to apply all the hunks of this diff (excluding ones that are specific to the XO-1.5 hardware) so that the output of this command looks similar to (or better than) the output of the earlier diff - i.e. so that the only differences between the 2 branches are the handful of changes that account for the differences in hardware.

Even in current state (before merging any new changes), the xo-1 branch is ready for building and should produce a bootable build. Here's how you kick off a build:

mkdir output cache builddir
cd output
make -f ../Makefile os5.img

After some time, the output file "os5.img" will be ready for flashing onto your unlocked XO.

If you're happy with this process, the next steps are to publish your build by uploading it to a webhost, and then announcing it on the OLPC devel and Fedora-OLPC mailing lists.

If you are a known community member, OLPC would probably be happy to give you access to machines where you can run these builds from and host the downloads. Otherwise, this is still a possibility but you'd probably first be expected to make and publish a couple of builds on your own. Similarly, it should be possible to get you direct access to commit to the main fedora-xo repository. Once usable builds are being published regularly, you could also take over this wiki page.

I may have forgotten a few considerations in the above braindump, but if you're interested then the next step is to give it a try and write about any troubles on the devel@lists.laptop.org mailing list, and we'll help you figure it out. -- User:DanielDrake 2009-07-14