Updates

Your XO laptop is a very flexible and interesting full-fledged computer. Its power is largely hidden behind a very young graphical interface (Sugar), but behind the scenes it runs the Fedora GNU/Linux operating system. Thousands of programs written for GNU and Linux systems will run on it, and many of them can be installed by pretty simple commands.

The first thing to do if you're interested in updating your XO is to request a developer key. This is a little file that turns off the DRM (digital restrictions) in your XO. See Activation and Developer Keys for how to do that. Even before receiving the key, you will be able to install most new programs. The key will let you install whole new versions of the operating system -- including ones created by the community of XO developers and owners.

New activities written specifically for the XO can be found listed under http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Category:Activities .

All kinds of programs written for Fedora GNU/Linux can be installed by using the "yum" command line tool. When you run it, you must log in as root. And because it is full of bugs, we suggest that you run it when nothing else is running on your XO.

Fedora software comes in packages called RPM's. If you find an RPM package of some program you want to try, you can use the "rpm --install thepackage.rpm" command (again after logging in as root). Many RPM packages can be found on the Internet at locations like http://www.gnu.org/software, http://rpmfind.net or http://sourceforge.net. Not every RPM will be for an XO (many other computers also use RPM), but the rpm command will immediately reject most that don't work here.

There is also a tool unique to XO's called olpc-update. You can run it by logging in as root and running: /usr/sbin/olpc-update. This will allow you to get important bug fixes and improvements direct from the developers at One Laptop Per Child.

Please add to this page (or its talk page) as you learn more about updating your XO. To edit pages like this, you will need to "register' in this web site by clicking the "Log in" link at the top of the page. Each XO owner can help each other XO owner by writing clear news and information in this wiki, where others can read it.