OS images

To emulate the OLPC environment on your Windows, Mac, or Linux machine, see #Images on an emulator.

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.

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://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 must meet the following criteria:

• USB image on A test board with Insyde BIOS
• NAND image on A test board with Insyde BIOS, booting via USB and kexec'ing into a kernel loaded from NAND (select OLPC NAND in grub on the USB stick)
• QEMU image
• USB image for A test board with LinuxBIOS
• NAND flash image for A test board with LinuxBIOS

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 mailing list to see whether there are known problems before selecting a build.

The latest stable build is build182.

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).

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 Installing_to_NAND page.

Wireless

See the Wireless page for detailed instructions.

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.