Talk:Ubuntu Gutsy On OLPC XO

Please ask your questions and post comments about installation of Ubuntu on the XO here so that all may benefit :D

So what's the disk drive driver on the XO? During the QEMU installation it doesn't detect a hard disk and asks me to choose from a list. Any ideas?

- How much of these instructions are Ubuntu-Specific? Could another distribution, such as DSL or Puppy, be made to work the same way?

• I think any recent linux could work. For Ubuntu I used the kernel from the original Red Hat and the modified xorg packages based from Debian as it was being developed to use the hardware display accelleration. Ubuntu had to be modified to use sysvinit instead of upstart because of how the kernel was configured. - Freelikegnu

- So basically If I had a working recent distro on a USB I could do step 7 (copy boot and other files from the XO) and it would most likely work?

When I install sysvinit, at the end I get "init: timeout opening/writing control channel /dev/initctl". I assume this is related to the note that upstart wants to be PID 1. Is this error important, or can I forge on despite it? 206.248.174.6 11:30, 3 February 2008 (EST)

So I forged on despite the error, and in the middle of installing xorg/xfce I started getting error messages every 2 seconds that start with ata2.00. I assume these are the ata errors that the instructions say are harmless. However, when I try to shutdown (sudo halt) I get "shutdown: timeout opening/writing control channel /dev/initctl". I rebooted with reboot -f and the ata errors reappear during startup (right after the "starting system log daemon" line, I think). 206.248.174.6 12:05, 3 February 2008 (EST)

Cleaning up Sugar afterwards?

Any instructions on how to get rid of all the bloat associated with Sugar and activities, after we've successfully installed Ununtu? After all, no point in having 2 OSes taking up space, is there? 207.34.120.71 12:55, 5 February 2008 (EST)

Speed of boot?

I just tried this using an 8 GB SDHC card from PQI. It's a 66X card. How quickly should the XO boot? For me, I see OpenFirmware load sd:\boot\olpc.fth with the correct command line, then it stops. No text scrolling, no advancement past that screen. I let it sit for a while, too: at least 10 minutes. I've followed the instructions to the T. I was using OLPC firmware 656 while readying it. Any ideas? Colin 01:59, 19 February 2008 (EST)

You need to force into check mode or you won't get prompt at the end of boot (it might still be working behind the scenes). Hold the check mark key at startup to force it, I ended up editing out the alternate option so it would only go in check mode (one of the .fth files had an extra option that seemed to get in the way).

Installing back-ported xorg drivers

I'm having problems installing the new xorg drivers that Holger Levsen back ported. When I start apt-get update, it throws the error about no public key for the layer-acht etch release, and says run apt-get update to correct the problem, which obviously doesn't work. If I go ahead and try to install it anyway, I get a broken packages error. Any ideas?

No new ideas here, but that is exactly what I ran into as well...