Category:Activity Pack: Difference between revisions

A category for user-generated activity packs.

There are other ways to install activities in release 8.2.0, see also Activity installation.

What is an Activity Pack?

An Activity Pack is a collection of Activity bundles.

Existing Activity Packs

All activity packs should have a descriptive page in Category:Activity Pack. Here are some notable ones:

• G1G1 activity pack
• Peru activity pack

Other sets of activities

• Activities/Other - a list of miscellaneous activities, including testing, noneducational, incomplete, and example-code activities.

Installing an activity pack

To use an activity pack:

1. Download its zip file.
2. Unzip it onto the root of a blank USB flash drive.
3. Open the file. If there is only one folder, open it and remove the three files that are in it so they stand individually. If the three files are enclosed within another file, the XO will not find them.
4. Insert the USB flash drive into your XO and reboot.
5. If your machine is not a secure XO (its firmware is unlocked), you must hold the X game key while booting .
6. When the installation is complete, the XO will shut itself off. Remove the USB key before powering it on.

Notes

• The USB flash drive should be formatted with a VFAT file system (FAT16 with long filename support); this is the common format for most USB sticks with capacity up to 2 GB.
  • It is important that the USB flash drive have a partition table, and that the VFAT file system be in the first partition. Linux allows you to put a file system directly on the drive itself without a partition table (i.e. "mkfs.vfat /dev/sdi", rather than fdisk and "mkfs.vfat /dev/sdi1"), but then on boot, the XO will panic with an error from mount ("non-zero status code 255").
• Do not use the SD card slot, you will end up with the same code 255 described above. You can use a SD card with a USB adapter.
• You can perform steps 1 and 2 on another computer, or if you are familiar with the Linux command line, on the XO in a terminal using wget and unzip.
• After step 2, the root of the USB flash drive should contain

 /customization-2
 /boot
 /bundles

• After rebooting your machine you must go to the List View in order to select the activities you want to appear in the Ring View

Linux will boot and unpack each of the bundles into place.

• Another future option for installing 'activity pack' bundles, from console use xo-get.

Update.1 and activity packs

Activities are no longer bundled with the core build in 8.1.0 ("Update.1") and subsequent releases (see Testing Update.1). So if you are updating a laptop you should prepare a USB flash drive per the instructions above. When you reboot after olpc-update, you can install activities at the same time.

Creating your own activity pack

The create-customization-key Python script will create a bundles/ directory with the activities for G1G1 (or Mexico, or Peru, or "all"). You should first unpack a customization key image (e.g. see Customization key) onto a USB flash drive, and then in the root of the USB flash drive run

 python create-customization-key G1G1

The advantage of creating the USB flash drive contents yourself is that you get the very latest activities from the Update.1 repository, as opposed to the versions from the time the Activity Pack was last updated.