OS images

The operating system used for OLPC is work-in-progress and so-called images are available from

http://olpc.download.redhat.com/olpc/streams/development

Build numbers

As the operating system for OLPC is under development, there are several builds available. The latest build might not always be stable since developers are experimenting with new features

Latest Stable

Latest stable build is build55. --DavidZeuthen 14:16, 28 July 2006 (EDT)

Image variants

Images are available in two variants

• Normal images
  • These are in the images/ subdirectory of a build.
  • Intended for production use; does not contain tools or software suitable for developers of the OLPC operating system

• Developer images
  • These are in the images-rpm/ sub-directory of a build
  • Contains tools useful for developers of the OLPC operating system
    • Presently includes: yum , rpm, vim-minimal, openssh-server, xterm, which, file, tree, wget, xterm, xorg-x11-twm, gdb
  • WARNING: Do not attempt to update the kernel on images-rpm builds - the initrd will be wrong. We're working on fixing this through including an olpc-mkinitrd package.

Using Images

For development we right now offer images that runs the OLPC operating system off a USB storage device. We're working on getting this to work on the NAND flash of the hardware too. Instructions to come.

Images on USB storage devices

To try out an image, simply download the appropriate .img.bz2 file, e.g.

olpc-stream-development-42-20060714_1709-rpm-ext3.img.bz2

unzip it, and transfer it to a USB storage device via e.g.

# bunzip2 olpc-stream-development-42-20060714_1709-rpm-ext3.img.bz2
# dd if=olpc-stream-development-42-20060714_1709-rpm-ext3.img of=/dev/sdb bs=512
# sync

Remember to

• Do this as the super user / root
• Replace /dev/sdb with the device file of the USB storage device
• Make sure any old partitions from the storage device is unmounted.
• The USB storage device must be 512MB or bigger. All existing data on it will be wiped.

Now you should be able to boot the OLPC operating system off the USB storage device.

Images in QEMU

The easiest way to test the images is to use qemu or some similar emulator. On Fedora Core 5, QEMU is included in extras and is very easy to install. As root just type

yum install qemu

and it should be installed. You may have to start the service for it. As root run:

service qemu start

Once you have an image downloaded, it is very easy to use qemu to launch the OLPC environment:

qemu -hda olpc-stream-development-7-20060609_1600-ext3.img

The simulator will start up at this point. When the screen turns green saying One Laptop Per Child at the bottom, press the spacebar to get the grub menu. It's important that you choose the OLPC Simulator option. The default for these images is to boot for the OLPC Hardware, not the Simulator.

We have heard multiple people say that QEMU doesn't work with these images on the debian-derived distributions. We also haven't heard of any solutions to these problems. The symptom is that the kernel hangs during boot.

Marcin: On Ubuntu Dapper it hangs with qemu 0.8.0 (from distro), but works with 0.8.1 from i386 binary tarball.

Vedran: It also hangs on Debian unstable with qemu 0.8.1-1 (from distro), but works with 0.8.1 from i386 binary tarball.