OLPC Software Testing
Overview
Right now we have images that are generated twice a day for testing. They are automatically built and do not go through any kind of regression testing before they are placed on the download site. We'll shortly have binary deltas between daily images and some scripts to make it easy to move from one day to the next instead of having to download a huge image.
You will notice that we have space several "streams" of development. Since we're in the middle of developing the initial operating system we only have the intial stream. Once we do alpha and beta and point releases, we'll have more than one stream for development.
Testing
There are two ways to test the images. You can either run them in a simulator, or you can attempt to run them on the OLPC hardware or your laptop.
Simulator
The easiest way to test the images is to use qemu or some similar emulator. On Fedora Core 5, QEMU is included in extras and is very easy to install. As root just type
yum install qemu
and it should be installed. You may have to start the service for it. As root run:
service qemu start
Once you have it installed it's very easy to use qemu to launch the OLPC environment:
qemu -hda olpc-stream-development-7-20060609_1600-ext3.img
The simulator will start up at this point. Once grub comes up it's important that you choose the USB Simulator option. The default for these images is to boot for the OLPC Hardware, not the Simulator.
We have heard multiple people say that QEMU doesn't work with these images on the debian-derived distributions. We also haven't heard of any solutions to these problems. The symptom is that the kernel hangs during boot.
OLPC Hardware or Laptop
The images that you can download are set up to run on 512MB of flash. The internal flash included on the OLPC Hardware is 512MB. You can also use a USB Key or USB Hard Drive that is at least 512MB. You can use drives that are larger than 512MB as well, but you won't be able to use more than the 512MB.
Once you've downloaded the image and decompressed it write it to the head of the drive. This will overwrite any data that's on the drive. We're not kidding.
How to write the data to the stick is best described in the Installing Fedora Core page. The only difference is that instead of using the diskboot.img file you will end up executing a command like this:
dd if=olpc-stream-development-7-20060609_1600-ext3.img of=/dev/sda
Once you're done that and your BIOS supports booting off of a USB Flash stick or Drive, you should be able to boot directly into the OLPC environment.