LiveBackup XO-LiveCD

This is a Live CD built from an OLPC ext3 OS image.

Project goals

• give children, students, teachers and parents the opportunity to participate and use the educational software on a common PC
• support demonstration of OLPC software to non-developers
• for developers the CD provides an easy maintainable Live system, which could be used to develop and test activities on the Sugar desktop

Please give feedback via mailing list

http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/livebackup-xo-cd

Press Information

http://www.olpcnews.com/software/operating_system/sugar_on_classmate_pc.html

http://futurezone.orf.at/hardcore/stories/268610/ (german)

http://www.linux-user.de/ausgabe/2008/04/024/ (german)

Versions

Version 8.2

ftp://rohrmoser-engineering.de/pub/XO-LiveCD/XO-LiveCD_081106.iso

This release is based on the ext3 image of the stable 8.2 branch, build 767 (release 8.2.0). The CD contains many activities, including all G1G1 activities.

Main features:

• latest stable version of the Sugar desktop
• large and customizable collection of activities
• expandable language support, already included are German, French, and Spanish languages.

Read the release notes.

Release Version 2008-09-19

ftp://rohrmoser-engineering.de/pub/XO-LiveCD/

and mirrored at

• http://www.skolelinux.de/XO-LiveCD/

The ISO images at the official repository are out of date and only have version 080607 of 2008-06-07:

• http://dev.laptop.org/pub/livebackupcd

A special edition (german) for Linuxtag 2008 in Berlin

http://www.skolelinux.de/XO-LiveCD/XO-LiveCD_Linuxtag2008.iso

Main features and changes since version 080321

• Dual boot option for update.1 and joyride builds. You can try out the new SUGAR design by booting a recent OLPC joyride version.
• Improved CD customization. Additional activities and RPM packages can be installed by putting them into CD top-level directories.
• A new script to prepare USB boot devices out of the Live-ISO image.
• Tested on a wide range of PC and laptop hardware and proved to work with all common virtual machines on Windows, MacOS and Linux.
• Additional Xorg graphic drivers and improved X11 auto-configuration tools.
• Bug fixes, updates and new activities.
• Linux kernel 2.6.24.7, using the aufs-filesystem.

Main features and changes since version 080130:

• the CD is based on OLPC development build 695
• better hardware support, based on linux kernel 2.6.24.3
• based on LiveBackup Version 1.4.3
• initial ASUS EeePC support (alpha)
• new bootsplash and improved boot-error handling
• playing chess and simulation of electronic circuits now works with gcompris
• bug fixes, updates and new extra activities

Main features and changes since the initial version 071206:

• the CD is based on OLPC development build 689
• during startup you can choose between English, Spanish, French or German language/keyboard settings.
• the Live-CD has an automated installation of additional (beta) activities. Depending on available RAM size you will get some or all of:

BlockParty-7.xo, CartoonBuilder-RC-1.7.xo, FlipSticks-RC-1.4.xo, Implode-2.xo, JigsawPuzzle-1_20071030.xo, Jump-1.xo, Maze-3.xo, Simcity-4.xo, SliderPuzzle-3_20071030.xo, Speak-3.xo, StopWatchActivity-1.xo, StoryBuilder-11.xo, branches-stable-ImageQuiz.activity-ImageQuiz.xo, gcompris.activity.xo

• the documentation has a new chapter about system installation on harddisk and configuration of a multiboot setup.

Emulation

You can run the CD image in an emulator using the -cdrom image_name.iso parameter. The minimal system requirements to start the XO-LiveCD without modifications (you may press F1 in the boot screen to read more) is 512 MB of RAM. So a command to load the CD image in QEMU is, roughly,

cd qemu directory
qemu.exe -L . -m 512 -kernel-kqemu -soundhw es1370 
  -net user -net nic,model=rtl8139 -cdrom XO-LiveCD_081106.iso

Even using the kqemu accelerator, the performance using QEMU on Windows is slow. You may find VirtualBox on Windows does a better job.