Future releases
All dates and features sets on Future releases are subject to change
For past releases, see the release notes page. To determine what release your XO-1 is running, see What release am I running?
Next-generation releases will not come from OLPC
- OLPC will not undertake, on its own, another major release of the software package we currently ship with each XO.
Nicholas Negroponte stated in a Q&A session:
- In what way will OLPC support the community in this transition? Will OLPC keep improving and debugging the software of the already delivered XOs?
- OLPC will move to a Linux desktop that will run Sugar as an application. Fedora 10, which shipped in November, is a major step in this direction. It’s a standard Fedora distribution that will boot on the XO-1 and includes Sugar as one of the desktop options. OLPC is working with the Fedora Project and Sugar Labs to provide a more tightly-integrated and better-performing version of this solution in the Fedora 11 release.
Many Linux distributions already run on the XO-1 hardware, and offer Sugar as a desktop option. Coordinating the latest pieces of the software stack is complicated work:
- XO changes to system software
- Enabling XO features on other distributions
- latest firmware
- latest Sugar from http://SugarLabs.org
So as of February 2009 there is no one release equivalent to joyride that has the latest of all these, but progress is being made quickly.
Future release work
Pure Fedora on XO
OLPC developers and the OLPC community are working on making "pure Fedora" a suitable environment for the XO. This does not indicate that OLPC will move towards the standard Fedora install of a GNOME desktop; rather, it implies that we'll seek coordination to produce a Fedora spin with Sugar as the default desktop, although the process will actually make it easy to boot any spin of Fedora on the XO-1.
Friends from the Fedora community and the Fedora-OLPC Special Interest Group are contributing, and we hope to see community involvement expanding. Please join the Fedora–OLPC mailing list.
Official OLPC releases have always been based on Fedora, but modifications were made to Fedora in order to better meet the goals and needs of the organization. This was only possible with a dedicated development team. The difference now is that we hope for Fedora to be suitable for the XO, with no modifications at all. That way, we are able to harness Fedora's existing resources for QA/testing, release engineering, etc, and OLPC will not face a high OS maintenance cost as it did in the previous development model.
Fedora 11 for XO-1.5 and XO-1 hardware
OLPC is developing a Fedora 11 Remix for the XO-1.5 hardware, see F11 for 1.5. Community volunteers are adapting this work to create images that run on the XO-1 hardware, see F11 for XO-1.
Earlier "Rawhide-XO" work
Initial work towards this goal was in the Rawhide-XO effort, adapting Fedora rawhide software images to run on the XO-1, including both Sugar and GNOME user interfaces.
Sugar on a Stick
SugarLabs regularly generate "Sugar on a Stick" releases: images that are intended to be installed on a USB flash drive and then booted on any computer. They also generate XO images for this. Images are generated using standard Fedora tools, so there will probably be increasing similarity between this build and the "pure Fedora on XO" builds above.
- http://download.sugarlabs.org/soas/xoimages/ : "Sugar on a Stick" images that run on the XO-1.
- Not yet ready for widespread adoption.
Other options
Category:Linux distributions lists other distributions that have been known to boot on the XO-1. Additionally, the work described above (and the development direction that it entails) will make it even easier for any up-to-date Linux distribution to be booted on the XO in future.
XO releases
Software releases from OLPC which run on the XO laptop.
Naming scheme
The first number in the release is its year. The second number represents the first or second major release in that year. The third number is incremented for each minor release.
For example, "8.2.0" is the second major release in 2008, and "8.1.1" is an update to the first major release in 2008.
Releases in 2007 and earlier used other naming schemes.
Past releases
See Release notes for past releases.
Other releases
9.1.0 - cancelled
- Status
- a specific 9.1.0 release from OLPC is not going to happen, see announcement. Requirements, schedule and full release were being tracked at 9.1.0.
- Maintainer
- Ed M.
8.1.3 (incomplete)
This release was created for Ethiopia, but it didn't meet their deadline, so it will not be formally released. The fixes have been added to Release 8.2.
XS releases
XO school Server software.
Past XS releases
Future XS releases
See the School server roadmap.