OS Builder/Run on XO hardware

From OLPC
< OS Builder
Revision as of 02:19, 13 June 2013 by Quozl (talk | contribs)
Jump to navigation Jump to search
The printable version is no longer supported and may have rendering errors. Please update your browser bookmarks and please use the default browser print function instead.

It is usually possible, if a bit slow, to run OS builder on XO hardware. On platforms where fast machines are available (such as x86), using a server-class "builder" machine is recommended.

When resources are limited, or if server-class machines are not available for the platform (such as ARM), this recipe is recommended.

The procedure has been tested with XO-1.75 and XO-4 hardware and builds of the 11.3.x series and 13.2.x series.

Ingredients

  • XO-1.75 or XO-4
  • Good, fast SD card for swap,
  • External USB HDD -- fast, large capacity, to store cached RPMs and build files,

Recipe

  • Install a recent OS (we used 11.3.1-17 or 13.2.0-8)
  • Boot to Sugar or Gnome, log in, connect to network
  • Disable automatic power management from the Sugar control panel
  • Insert external SD card to be used for swap
  • Prepare the SD for swap -- in a terminal, as root
 # see what block device id is the external SD
 mount 
 
 # unmount any existing partition
 umount /media/mysdcard
 
 # use fdisk to delete manufacturer's partition
 # create a new partition, of at least 2GB, type 82
 fdisk /dev/mmcblkN
 
 # prepare the new partition to be swap
 # it will report a UUID identifier
 partprobe
 mkswap /dev/mmcblkNp1
   
 # add this line to fstab to use swap automatically on every boot
 UUID=<UUID reported by mkswap> swap swap defaults 0 0
 
 # enable all swap partitions in fstab
 swapon -a -v
  • Prepare the HDD partitioning it with fdisk with a large partition of type "83", then use mkfs to create an ext3 or ext4 partition.
  • Ensure the system date is correct, if not -- use date -s "current date" to set
  • Follow the OS Builder development installation instructions -- remember to disable firstboot, and note that you will want to have your OS Builder directory on the external USB disk
  • On F14, you will need to bind-mount /var/tmp to be on your external USB HDD; some large tmp files:
 mkdir /media/externaldisk/vartmp
 cp -pr /var/tmp/* /media/externaldisk/vartmp/
 mount -o bind /media/externaldisk/vartmp /var/tmp
  • For 11.3.x, we want to work on branch v4.0, so
  git checkout -b v4.0 origin/v4.0
  • For 13.2.x, install the olpc-os-builder package:
sed -i '/excludedocs/d' /etc/rpm/macros.imgcreate
yum install olpc-os-builder
  • During test builds, generating only one image is faster -- edit examples/olpc-os-11.3.1-xo1.75.ini to disable 8GB image generation and comment out the "usb_update" module.

Your setup is ready, you can now do: 

 sudo ./osbuilder.py examples/olpc-os-11.3.1-xo1.75.ini
Retrieved from "http://wiki.laptop.org/mediawiki/index.php?title=OS_Builder/Run_on_XO_hardware&oldid=287451"