Live CD

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<< Emulating the XO

A LiveCD is a bootable medium which has an operating system executed upon boot without installing to internal storage. It provides a method for a user to try out a new operating system without making any permanent changes. LiveCDs are generally distributed as .iso (ISO 9660) images. The .iso images are downloaded and then burned onto a CD-ROM using a program that can create a CD from a file (note that MS Windows XP cannot do this natively, please do not copy an ISO image .iso file to CD; it's not what you want), copied to a prepared USB key, or installed on a virtual machine.

Several efforts are underway to create a liveCD emulating the XO and the Sugar environment.

Current efforts

Sbuntnu

Sugar-jhbuild Live CD

Download

LiveBackup XO-LiveCDs

Current version: ftp://rohrmoser-engineering.de/pub/XO-LiveCD/XO-LiveCD_080919.iso
 For more Information see LiveBackup XO-LiveCD
  • The Project is hosted at git

These LiveCDs allow you to convert a "regular" machine into a Sugar-running machine without touching the hard disk of the machine. This allows you to play with and test how the software runs with your hardware. It also lets you demonstrate and potentially test your software (at full speed).

It is also possible to use this type of LiveCD to create a "virtual Sugar lab" for a school, where a traditional computer lab's computers are booted into a Sugar environment, storing their data on a networked or other storage device, without changing the lab's installed software. (How? Link would be appreciated)

XUbuntu Gutsy LiveCD

A XUbuntu LiveCD with the Sugar Ubuntu package (with installation capability and launch-from-USB-key). Allows you to run Sugar directly on the hardware with an XUbuntu environment as well. A full working Live-CD with a recent build is available.

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=670171 has further discussion.

Pilgrim Fedora LiveCD

A Fedora Pilgrim LiveCD with the official image pre-downloaded and configured to run in Qemu with KQemu. Allows you to run the image from the standard Fedora desktop inside an emulator.

OLPC XO-1 LiveCD (obsolete)

Note:

The LiveCD has not been updated since early April 2007. Much which now works, was not even started back then. The maintainers seem to have abandoned it. Greg DeKoenigsberg took a look at another way to automatically generate LiveCDs in a recent blog post, but this is apparently still a work-in-progress.

Until someone starts maintaining this again, it looks like the best way is to go with other LiveCDs listed above, or work with the XO software is via emulation


Download (right-click and 'Save Link as') olpc-redhat-stream-sdk-livecd.iso. You can check when the file was last updated here.

The LiveCD may not boot off an external optical-drive connected via USB.

Ivan Krstić wrote:

All our builds, including LiveCD ones, are built using the pilgrim tool:

    http://gitweb.freedesktop.org/?p=users/david/pilgrim.git

That's where you want to start investigating if you're interested in mastering your own.

External links