OS images

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Revision as of 16:54, 1 September 2006 by 141.154.54.207 (talk) (add link to mesh)
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Definition

OLPC and Red Hat continually develop the Fedora-derived OLPC Linux operating system. Each day, we freeze the most up-to-date version of that OS, and make it available for download as an OS image.

Downloads

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. Each build is labeled with a unique version number. When reporting problems on mailing lists, please make sure you list the build number you are using.

You can download the latest images from:

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

Latest Stable Build

A build is marked "stable" when the developers are happy with a build. At minimum, a stable build will meet the criterion:

  • USB image on A test board with Insyde BIOS
  • NAND image on A test board with Insyde BIOS, booting via USB and kexec'ing into a kernel loaded from NAND (select OLPC NAND in grub on the USB stick)
  • QEMU image
  • USB image for A test board with LinuxBIOS (for post-build59)

At some point this will include:

  • NAND flash image for A test board with LinuxBIOS

Source: David Zeuthen on devel mailing list.

A stable build does not mean everything is working, nor that it is actually "stable." For example, for a while Sugar and X were both broken in a stable build, but virtual consoles worked fine and that was enough to get work done for most developers. Casual downloader and those upgrading to a new build beware: check the mailing list to see whether there are known problems before selecting a build.

The latest stable build is build59. --Blizzard 23:35, 8 Aug 2006 (EDT)

Image variants

Images are available in two variants

  • Normal images, in images/ sub-directory
    • Intended for production use
    • Does not contain tools or software suitable for developers of the OLPC operating system
  • Developer images, in images-rpm/ sub-directory
    • Contains tools useful for developers of the OLPC operating system, including: yum, rpm, vim-minimal, openssh-server, xterm, which, file, tree, wget, xorg-x11-twm, gdb packages
    • 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.

Each variant may have available in three sub-variants:

  • ext3: ext3 filesystem; use this if you don't know what you need
  • jffs2: JFFS2 filesystem that will be used on the NAND flash on OLPC hardware
  • tree: Have no filesystem, and consist of just a tarball of the OS directory tree

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.

Passwords

The images have no password set at build time. This means you can log in as root using no password. Always remember to change the password as the first thing when start using an image.

As the image-rpm variant ships with an SSH server you thus need to set the password to be able to login from a remote host. This is a feature of sshd.

Password handling is subject to change before official release.

Images on a USB disk

The OS images for USB disks page describes how to write these images to a USB disk, so that you can test the images on real OLPC hardware, or attempt to boot from them on your own PC.

Images on an emulator

The OS images for emulation page details how you can run the OS images on a normal PC, without the OLPC hardware.

Images with the on-board NAND flash on OLPC hardware

See the Installing_to_NAND page.

Wireless

Tested with Build 76 by Quozl and JvC on OLPC hardware.

The result was that eth0 appeared in ifconfig, and the browser was able to access google.com, thanks to the automatic network configuration.

Mesh wireless

There is new firmware with mesh routing support: https://www.marvell.com/drivers/driverDisplay.do?dId=164&pId=38

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