XS Installing Software 0.6

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This page describes how to obtain a copy of the XS school server software, load it onto media, and install it onto a system. A more complete description of the software repositories is available.

Downloading the System Image

You can obtain the latest image from http://xs-dev.laptop.org/xs/:

wget http://xs-dev.laptop.org/xs/OLPC_XS_LATEST.iso

This can be copied onto a CD or DVD using your favorite software.

It may also be copied onto a USB key, using the livecd-tools provided by Fedora 7:

livecd-iso-to-disk OLPC_XS_LATEST.iso /dev/sdb1

where /dev/sdb1 represents the USB key being copied onto.

Installing the Software

The install from a CD or USB key will eventually be automatic upon booting. While the install is currently mostly automated (not interactive), it is not performed automatically upon boot.

1. Boot from the USB Key or CD-ROM -- Getting an older system to boot from a USB key can be difficult, but most will do it.
2. Select "Run from Image" at the initial boot screen.
3. When it has finished booting, login as root (no password is required) and type:

./olpc-install

1. You will be prompted for the root password
2. When it has finished installing, you will need to reboot. Remove the CD-ROM or USB key after power-down, but before the boot process begins.

You should now have a machine which somewhat resembles a school server. The default server setup is to connect to the Internet on the first wired network interface, using DHCP. Laptops connect to the server over the wireless mesh using one or more Active Antenna, connected through USB interfaces

Installing additional software

If you wish to install packages that aren't part of the default school server distribution, you should first try using yum. The stable and testing school server repositories include all packages included in Fedora, even if they aren't installed by default. For third party software, such as Moodle, you should follow their installation procedure for Fedora 7

Release Notes

OLPC_XS_137

This release supports hot-plug of the Active Antennas (unplugging and plugging while the server is running.) It also provides the latest firmware and drivers for the Active Antennas, fixing a number of stability problems and avoiding a problem where the mesh interacted badly with conventional 802.11b/g access points running a Broadcom chipset (such as the Linksys WRT54G).

Known Problems

• Plenty of missing functionality.

Upgrading from earlier releases

This has been tested and should work fine, with one intentional exception:

To avoid disturbing any manual configuration of the server network interfaces, hot-plug of the Active Antennas will not be supported on an upgraded machine until /etc/sysconfig/olpc-scripts/network-config.py is run manually. After running this script, any manually configured network scripts (in /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/) will be saved with a .bak suffix.

OLPC_XS_128

This release has the registration server required for Trial3, as well as a fix to the inittab script which caused problems in India.

OLPC_XS_127

A bug fix release, due to our lame QA department not testing build 126 on a server with a single wired interface before release. This fixes the network configuration problems in 125 and 126 on servers with a single wired interface.

OLPC_XS_126

A bug fix release. This fixes the mesh channel assignment and network configuration problems in 125

OLPC_XS_125

This release has basic network functionality. It supports laptops on the mesh.

It does NOT autoinstall automatically. You will need to login as root (no password), then run /root/olpc-install. You will be prompted for a root password, otherwise the installation is automatic.

Missing:

• Registration
• Web services
• Presence service
• A configuration interface
• Lots more...

Known Problems:

• /etc/named.conf isn't being installed correctly from the xs-config RPM. The fix is:

cp /etc/named.conf.olpcnew /etc/named.conf

• Hotplug of the mesh interfaces doesn't trigger a restart of the olpc-mesh-config, which is needed for the mesh to work.
• SELinux is left in permissive mode, instead of completely disabled. Edit /etc/selinux/config and set SELINUX=disabled
• The channel on the mesh interface isn't being set correctly. This causes problems with XO builds later than 542. Set the channel manually using iwconfig for now. Fixed in build 126.
• The network configuration script could fail and assign a mesh interface as the WAN. Fixed in build 127.
• On machines with no serial port, there might be a problem resulting in an error message on the console: INIT : Id "s0" respawning too fast : disabled for 5 minutes. This is fixed in xs-config v0.1.7-4, (not currently in any live CD build).

The most common problem with the mesh is due to a hardware problem with the Marvell wireless modules used in the Active Antennas. They frequently do not reset properly, and need to be power cycled. The symptom is that you will get a message: "libertas: Unable to init firmware" on the console, and ifconfig won't show a mesh interface. A reboot will not fix the situation, you need to actually power cycle the USB adapter by unplugging it and plugging it back in.

Manual Configuration

There are some site-specific configuration which will need to be manually administered until we have a configuration interface in place. Specifically, these are setting up the WAN interface and assigning a domain name.

WAN Connection

The file which configures this interface is /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0. The current default is to use DHCP to assign an IP address to this interface, and obtain DNS server info.

Domain Name

This name currently set to random.xs.laptop.org is unfortunately embedded in a number of files:

/etc/named.conf
/var/named/school.zone.inaddr.db
/var/named/school.zone.16.inaddr.db
/var/named/school.zone.32.inaddr.db
/var/named/school.zone.48.inaddr.db