Emulating the XO
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In the past, OLPC produced alternative software images which could be run in emulators such as QEMU and VMWare. This meant that development and testing could happen to a limited extent without requiring an XO laptop. However, these images had limitations and were a drain on resources to produce and maintain.
Emulation-capable images are currently not available. However, XOs are readily available to trusted contributors through the Contributors program.
Sugar, the unique user interface of the XO laptops, is now distributed as a generic software project and can be easily installed, developed and tested on "regular" computers as well as XOs. See Sugar Labs Downloads for the full range of options.
For emulation of very old builds, you may be able to come across "ext3 images" on some corners of http://download.laptop.org and http://xs-dev.laptop.org/~cscott/olpc/streams/ which can be loaded into emulators.