OS images
To emulate the OLPC environment on your Windows, Mac, or Linux machine, see Emulating the XO.
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, "build" an OS image, and make it available for download in various formats.
Upgrades
XO users should follow Upgrading the XO to upgrade to later system software.
Download directories for images
There have been several major releases and many minor releases of the operating system for OLPC, and maintenance and development continues. Thus there are many 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 provide the build number you are using.
Stable builds
Stable, signed builds for the XO-1 are available from:
Stable builds are cryptographically signed so that any XO can be upgraded to them — you do not need a developer key.
A build is marked "stable" when the developers are happy with it. At minimum, it should boot successfully on XO laptops and have release notes; it normally goes through the Software ECO process.
Latest stable build
The latest stable build is the highest-numbered build at http://download.laptop.org/xo-1/os/official; the green "infobox" on this page and others also gives the latest stable.
Release candidate
When developers have some confidence in a particular build, they may invite wider testing of it; see Friends in testing. Some release candidates are signed and thus can be installed on any XO; others are unsigned and require that you get a developer key.
Signed release candidate builds are available from:
Development builds
Casual downloaders and those upgrading to a new build beware:
- check the Tinderbox to see whether there are known problems before selecting a build
- read the Test Group Release Notes to look for testing results on a build
- you must get a Developer key before you can install a development build on your XO
Development streams
OLPC development proceeds in several streams. There are updates to existing major releases, experimental features, and the general "latest version", called joyride. Each stream has development builds.
"8.2.1" images include relatively stable builds leading up to the next 8.2.x build. (As of January 2009, build 799 is the latest candidate for a possible 8.2.1 release in this build stream).
You can download unstable development images from:
- http://xs-dev.laptop.org/~cscott/olpc/streams (look in "latest" in each stream's directory)
joyride is the primary development stream (as of January 2009 leading towards a release 9.1.0), "staging" is the integration stream for a possible 8.2.1 release, and other streams such as "faster" may be available for testing experimental features.
Historical builds
Finally, historical builds are available from:
Image variants
Images are available in five variants
- Normal images in the ext3/ and jffs2/ sub-directories
- Intended for production use
- Does not contain tools or software suitable for developers of the OLPC operating system
- The ext3/ images are intended for USB drives (both hard drives and flash drives)
- The jffs2/ images are intended for the on-board NAND flash.
- Developer images in the devel_ext3/ and devel_jffs2/ sub-directories
- 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
- The devel_ext3/ images are intended for USB drives (both hard drives and flash drives)
- The devel_jffs2/ images are intended for the on-board NAND flash
- WARNING: Do not attempt to update the kernel on devel_* builds - the initrd will be wrong. We're working on fixing this through including an olpc-mkinitrd package.
- Live CD images in the livecd/ sub-directory
- Contains an iso of a normal image which can be burned onto a cd and run by booting off the cd drive
Each variant may have available several sub-variants:
- tree: a tarball of the OS directory tree, without a filesystem
- img: a filesystem image (of one of the types described above): you can follow the Clean-install procedure to re-flash your XO with this.
- .toc and .usb: the OS image in a special format that olpc-update can use to perform an update from USB drive
These may be compressed in the bz2 format, requiring the free bunzip2 utility to uncompress.
What's in an OS image
The download directory for a build's often includes a build.log that shows the software packages and steps that created it. It is the output of the build process.
You can uncompress the tree version of a build on a running computer to examine the files in the build.
Differences between streams
http://dev.laptop.org/~bert has several streamA-streamB.html files that track the different packages in different streams. For example, 8.2.1-staging.html compares the latest 8.2.1 candidate build with the latest staging build.
Languages in which the images are available
- English
- The home Language for each participating country
Using images
Installing images to on-board NAND flash on OLPC hardware
The Clean-install procedure describes how to put an image and supporting files on a USB disk or flash drive so that your XO's firmware will re-flash its NAND memory and thus update to the new image.
Updating OLPC hardware from USB
Newer build directories also provide osNNN.toc and osNNN.usb files. These are reference files for the olpc-update command-line tool, so that you can update a running XO to the new build from a USB flash drive.
Booting images from a USB drive
For development we offer images that run the OLPC operating system off a USB storage device. These images are located in the devel_ext3/ sub-directory, and should be used if you're unsure of which image to choose.
The OS images for USB disks page describes how to write these images to a USB disk or flash drive, 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 Emulating the XO page details how you can run an image of the OLPC operating system on a normal computer that doesn't have the OLPC hardware.
Passwords
Some recent builds do not permit root login. There are quite a few tickets. You can login as olpc, no password, and sudo -i instead. MitchellNCharity 14:40, 6 January 2008 (EST)
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.
Wireless
See the Wireless page for detailed instructions.
Test group release notes for images
The Test Group Release Notes page lists the "official" changelog and known problems for each build. Check that page to see if there are any known problems with the build you're installing.
User feedback on images
If you have an XO, see Friends in testing.
Using the User Feedback on Images page, you can see how the images worked on various systems, using various different hardware and emulator set-ups. You can also add your own reviews.
Build names and branches
XO users should see Release notes and What release am I running?; developers can also refer to Builds and Future releases.