OS images
To emulate the OLPC environment on your Windows, Mac, or Linux machine, see Emulating the XO.
Definition
OLPC and Red Hat continually develop the Fedora-derived OLPC Linux operating system. Each day, we freeze the most up-to-date version of that OS, and make it available for download as an OS image.
Upgrades
The recommended method to update your development board or BTest system, is Autoreinstallation image. Please see that and then return here if you want a different image.
Downloads
As the operating system for OLPC is under development, there are several builds available. The latest build might not always be stable since developers are experimenting with new features. Each build is labeled with a unique version number. When reporting problems on mailing lists, please make sure you list the build number you are using.
You can download the latest images from:
http://xs-dev.laptop.org/~cscott/olpc/streams (look in "latest")
And older ones from:
http://olpc.download.redhat.com/olpc/streams/development
Latest Stable Build
A build is marked "stable" when the developers are happy with it. At minimum, it should boot successfully on A-Test boards and B-Test laptops. A stable build does not mean everything is working, nor that it is actually "stable." For example, for a while Sugar and X were both broken in a stable build, but virtual consoles worked fine and that was enough to get work done for most developers.
Casual downloaders and those upgrading to a new build beware: check the Tinderbox to see whether there are known problems before selecting a build.
The latest stable build is the highest-numbered build at [1].
Image variants
Images are available in five variants
- Normal images in the ext3/ and jffs2/ sub-directories
- Intended for production use
- Does not contain tools or software suitable for developers of the OLPC operating system
- The ext3/ images are intended for USB drives (both hard drives and flash drives)
- The jffs2/ images are intended for the on-board NAND flash.
- Developer images in the devel_ext3/ and devel_jffs2/ sub-directories
- Contains tools useful for developers of the OLPC operating system, including: yum, rpm, vim-minimal, openssh-server, xterm, which, file, tree, wget, xorg-x11-twm, gdb packages
- The devel_ext3/ images are intended for USB drives (both hard drives and flash drives)
- The devel_jffs2/ images are intended for the on-board NAND flash
- WARNING: Do not attempt to update the kernel on devel_* builds - the initrd will be wrong. We're working on fixing this through including an olpc-mkinitrd package.
- Live CD images in the livecd/ sub-directory
- Contains an iso of a normal image which can be burned onto a cd and run by booting off the cd drive
Each variant may have available two sub-variants:
- tree: a tarball of the OS directory tree, without a filesystem
- img: a filesystem image (of one of the types described above).
Languages in which the images are available
- english
- the home Language for each participating country
Using Images
For development we offer images that run the OLPC operating system off a USB storage device. These images are located in the devel_ext3/ sub-directory, and should be used if you're unsure of which image to choose.
Passwords
The images have no password set at build time. This means you can log in as root using no password. Always remember to change the password as the first thing when start using an image.
As the image-rpm variant ships with an SSH server you thus need to set the password to be able to login from a remote host. This is a feature of sshd.
Password handling is subject to change before official release.
Images on a USB disk
The OS images for USB disks page describes how to write these images to a USB disk, so that you can test the images on real OLPC hardware, or attempt to boot from them on your own PC.
Images on an emulator
The OS images for emulation page details how you can run an image of the OLPC operating system on a normal computer that doesn't have the OLPC hardware.
Images with the on-board NAND flash on OLPC hardware
See the Autoreinstallation image page.
Wireless
See the Wireless page for detailed instructions.
Test Group Release Notes for Images
The Test Group Release Notes page lists the "official" changelog and known problems for each build. Check that page to see if there are any known problems with the build you're installing.
User Feedback on Images
Using the User_Feedback_on_Images page, you can see how the images worked on various systems, using various different hardware and emulator set-ups. You can also add your own reviews.
Build names and branches
(from 2007-12-04 mailing list message by Chris Ball:)
- Ship.1 is build623, and was preloaded on all mass production XO machines for a while.
- It isn't preloaded on new machines, and any machine with it installed should since have been updated to Ship.2. It was released around 2007-11-01. It will mostly not be seen by the outside world at all.
- Ship.2 is build650
- It is the build received by Give One Get One recipients, as well as the Uruguay Ceibal project users. (Actually, Uruguay is using a slightly custom build, but it's based on Ship.2.) It was released around 2007-12-01.
- Update.1 is not released, and as of December 2007 being worked on in the "joyride" branch.
- After code freeze, scheduled for around 2007-12-15, a copy of the joyride branch will be made and named update.1, and any development that isn't targeting Update.1 can continue in joyride. Update.1 release is scheduled for mid January, as seen on the roadmap.
- The roadmap also contains the feature goals for Update.1. Machines can be automatically upgraded (preserving user data) from Ship.2 to Update.1 after release.
- Joyride
- Can be thought of as synonymous with "trunk" or "HEAD" or "unstable", much like the Debian/unstable distribution.