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
XO users should follow olpc-upgrade or Secure Upgrade to upgrade to later system software.
For developers, another 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.
Stable, signed builds for the XO-1 are available from:
Signed, release candidate builds are available from:
"Update.1" images include relatively stable builds leading up to the next 8.1.x build. (As of August 2008, build 711 is the latest candidate for a possible 8.1.2 release in the update.1 build stream):
You can download unstable development images from:
- http://xs-dev.laptop.org/~cscott/olpc/streams (look in "latest" in each stream's directory) — joyride is the primary stream, with others available for testing experimental features
And historical builds are available from:
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.
The latest stable build is the highest-numbered build at http://download.laptop.org/xo-1/os/official; the green "infobox" on this page and others also gives the latest stable.
Release candidate
When developers have some confidence in a particular build, they may invite wider testing of it; see Friends in testing. Some release candidates are signed and thus can be installed on any XO; others are unsigned and require that you get a developer key.
Development builds
Casual downloaders and those upgrading to a new build beware:
- check the Tinderbox to see whether there are known problems before selecting a build
- read the Test Group Release Notes to look for testing results on a build
- you must get a Developer key before you can install a development build on your XO
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
Some recent builds do not permit root login. There are quite a few tickets. You can login as olpc, no password, and sudo -i instead. MitchellNCharity 14:40, 6 January 2008 (EST)
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 Emulating the XO 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 Clean-install procedure and the Olpc-update 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
(Moved to separated Builds page; also see Releases.)