Emulating the XO/Mac Parallels3
Step by step instructions for getting XO emulation up on a Mac using Parallels v3
Create a new virtual machine.
Specify Custom OS.
Select Other Linux.
Specify 256MB RAM.
Create new (empty) 1GB hard disk.
Specify 1GB plain disk.
Choose networking option.
Name the virtual machine OLPC.
Optimize performance for VM.
Uncheck Start Other Linux installation.
(blank) 1GB HD image is created.
Quit Parallels, since so far we only have a blank disk image. Take a look at it.
$ ls -l ${HOME}/Documents/Parallels/OLPC/otherlin.hdd/*.hds
-rw-r--r-- ... 1073995776 Jan 3 00:30 .../otherlin.hdd.0.{some-parallels-hex-code}.hds
I use a script to copy an XO image onto the blank 1GB disk just created.
$ cat ~/bin/mk-otherlin-olpc
#!/bin/bash
# edit these to match your system
IND=/Users/gknauth/test/olpc
INF=xo-1-olpc-stream-joyride-build-1492-20080102_2219-devel_ext3.img.bz2
OUTD=/Users/gknauth/Documents/Parallels/OLPC/otherlin.hdd
OUTF='otherlin.hdd.0.{some-parallels-hex-code}.hds'
bzcat "$IND/$INF" | dd "of=$OUTD/$OUTF" bs=1024 conv=notrunc,noerror,sync
Invoke the script.
$ ~/bin/mk-otherlin-olpc 949840+1 records in 949841+0 records out 972637184 bytes transferred in 190.564697 secs (5103974 bytes/sec)
I am glad that the number of bytes transferred is less than the size of the hard disk I created. If that had not been the case, I would later get a Grub Error 18 (selected cylinder exceeds maximum supported by BIOS).
$ ls -l ${HOME}/Documents/Parallels/OLPC/otherlin.hdd/*.hds
-rw-r--r-- ... 1073995776 Jan 3 00:40 .../otherlin.hdd.0.{some-parallels-hex-code}.hds
Now that we have a real XO image copied over to our hard disk, we can start Parallels again.
Select OLPC VM to run.
Start OLPC VM.
OLPC VM begins to boot.
OLPC VM is booting.
Enter your name.
Your OLPC is running.
Trusty terminal.
At this point, there is no networking. What I want to do is the following:
$ sudo bash # ifup eth0
However ifup eth0 is failing for me. I still mention it because it seems to have worked for most other people. Try different networking options when initially creating the Parallels virtual machine.
Some of the suggestions I pursued, such as creating an empty hard disk and then using a dd command that does not truncate the image, came from BruceB and ScottSwanson at Emulating_the_XO/Mac.