Talk:OS images

Experiences with the build images:

Dell Latitude D600 Laptop with USB image build59

I'm no expert in Linux at all, but I really wanted to try the OLPC build to see how it works... I have a Mac & a Windows PC. I tried transferring to the USB stick using dd for windows http://www.chrysocome.net/dd but had problems with the end of the file (to do with the --size switch I think).

So instead used my mac to download the image, decompressed it using apple's BOMArchiveHelper, then transferred the image to the USB drive using the dd application from the Terminal, which worked well.

Then I shutdown the PC (a Dell Latitude D600 laptop), inserted the USB key, rebooted, changed the BIOS to boot from the USB (by holding down F2 on boot-up), and it all came up well.

I logged in as root, no password, but when I got the the command line, every few seconds what looked like an X-windows login window would appear asking me for a username (default OLPC). I pressed OK on this, then the screen went back to my command line. Then a few seconds later the same thing happened, and kept happening repeatedly. I tried some other usernames in the window, such as root, but this didn't solve the problem.

Just thought I'd let you know, I hope this is the correct place for this sort of feedback!

--Tomhannen 06:14, 11 August 2006 (EDT)

X looks to be dying after startup for some reason, hence the switching between the GUI (X) and the command line. I don't see this with build 59 when run on the OLPC boards, so it may be related to your machine. Have you tried Qemu? --SamatJain 11:18, 11 August 2006 (EDT)

Haven't tried qemu, as I don't have a machine that runs linux, I'm ashamed to say... Is there a LiveCD I could try with QEmu preinstalled? In fact, a liveCD for potential testers of the OLPC project might be a good idea... --Tomhannen 11:38, 11 August 2006 (EDT)

Hi. Tried QEmu today (see below). Here's the error I got with the USB image booting directly on the Dell (just for reference):

(EE) FBDEV(0): FBIOBLANK: Invalid Argument

(EE) AIGLX: Sceen 0 is not DRI compatible

(EE) FBDEV(0): FBIOBLANK: Invalid Argument

localuser:root being added to access control list

waiting for X server to shut down FreeFontPath: FPE "unix/:7100" refcount is 2, should be 1; fixing.

So I had a look at the Qemu user forum http://qemu.dad-answers.com/ to see if there are any live CDs with qemu pre-configured.. And there are - one in particular called SLAX KillBill Edition v 5.1.7b http://www.slax.org/download.php

So I downloaded it, burnt to CD (eventually using the correct option in Roxio: File menu, then "Record Disk from Image"), and booted on my Dell Laptop.

SLAX asks you to login as "root", password is "toor".

Then I plugged in the usb stick. I had to mount the USB stick on the file system.. My file system had used device name "sda1" for the USB stick... Yours might not be.

So I typed

mkdir /mnt/sda1

to create a mount point for the USB stick, then

mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/sda1

then looked in the directory I'd just mounted

cd /mnt/sda1
ls

then typed qemu -hda olpc-stream-development-59-20060808_1153-ext3a.img

which didn't work, it crashed with:

Could not open '/dev/kqemu' - QEMU acceleration layer not activated Could not open SDL display

So I tried without -hda and got the same error... So I looked through the manpages on qemu, and tried

qemu -hda -no-kqemu olpc-stream-development-59-20060808_1153-ext3a.img

with no luck, so tried

qemu -no-kqemu olpc-stream-development-59-20060808_1153-ext3a.img

which gave the same SDL error, but without the bit about acceleration. Hope this is of use to someone. --Tomhannen 10:39, 12 August 2006 (EDT)