Emulating the XO
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Emulators and Virtual Servers allow you to run a "virtual" computer on any machine.
Strictly speaking, with emulators it is not usually a specific system that is emulated but a generic x86 processor with Sugar, so this emulation has some limits. The customized devices on an XO cannot be emulated, and some peripherals in your PC may not be supported through the emulated XO.
Emulators convert the codes written/compiled for a particular system and convert them to the host computers architecture. Virtualisation Servers differ from Emulation by not being able to convert the codes, they run the operating system on the host CPU. Virtualisation is much faster than an emulator because of this.
- For configuration and Usage, see our quick start and emulation on Linux guide.
- For a detailed tutorial on emulation, see the IBM Tutorial.
- Operating-specific details are available : Win Mac Linux
- For tweaks to your system, see Improving emulation.
- For a comparison of environments and operating systems on which each have been tested, see Comparison of Alternatives
See the Developer's Manual for a discussion of the merits of various packages and the ways you might want to use emulation in the development process. Keep in mind that emulation is NOT perfect.
Emulators
At present, QEMU is used most frequently. It is both an Emulator and a Virtual Server.
- If you are running Linux, there is an experimental package to simplify using qemu for emulation. Feedback encouraged. MitchellNCharity 15:03, 6 January 2008 (EST)
Build recommendations
For running XO disk images on an emulator, you must use an ext3 image, not the JFFS2 image which is for on-board NAND flash memory. Please note that the current stable release is available only in JFFS2 and the "latest" developer build may not yet be usable in ext3 at this time. So please check some older builds. Some builds are better than others and the most recent one will not always work.
Here is a summary of current status. Please add your own experiences here, and in User Feedback on Images.
Current joyride builds generally work (as of ~1400). Presence service (mesh view and collaboration) wont work by default, because they are configured with a presence service providing jabber server of ship2.jabber.laptop.org, which doesn't yet exist. There is an overloaded and fragile jabber.laptop.org which may be used in the meantime. -- MitchellNCharity 22:42, 14 December 2007 (EST)
- Another jabber server alternative is: jabber.xochat.org (typically 60 to 80 people online) --ixo 03:29, 5 January 2008 (EST)
- Please be aware that the xochat.org server is also overloaded, and the load is proportional to the product of the number of registrees times the current number of users, for the reasons documented at XMPP_Extensions. So don't connect (and thus automatically register) unless you will really be contributing, and/or set up your own ejabberd server. NealMcBurnett 15:39, 7 January 2008 (EST)
I've had good luck with all of the ship2 builds under VMware Workstation 6. -- Ed Borasky (Znmeb), 15 December 2007.
External links
- Sugar, the XO laptop, and One Laptop per Child, M. Tim Jones. developerWorks. IBM, 2007-04-24.