Talk:Ubuntu Lucid on OLPC XO

It works!! Just following the instructions, more or less, gave me a running system.

A few details:

There need to be a few more "sudo" commands. I am not sure if it is needed for depmod, but it is certainly needed for the following "ln".

 depmod 2.6.31_xo1-xxxxxxx

 ln -s /lib/firmware/libertas/usb8388_v9.bin /lib/firmware/usb8388.bin

I used qemu, using the USB device as HDA, and with additional memory -- when I tried to install everything using 256MB of RAM, the install would always crash. Here are my two qemu commands, the first one for booting from the cdrom (to be done initially), the second for booting from the hard disk. Pay attention to the stuff in parentheses -- you really do need to check which device your usb drive is on (I did it with

 ls -l /dev/disk/by-id/

you may have other methods), and the tftp option was needed to load the develop.sig, which I had on a different device:

 sudo qemu -hda /dev/sdc (check) -cdrom ubuntu-10.04-beta2-desktop-i386.iso -m 512 -boot d -net nic -net user
 sudo qemu -hda /dev/sdc (check) -m 512 -boot c -net nic -net user(,tftp=/home/user/olpc)

to use these, remove the "(check)" (only after checking! :-), and, if you need to transfer files from the host, remove the parentheses around the tftp option, e.g. -net user,tftp=/home/foo/xyz, where the path indicates the root of the tree accessible with the tftp command. Once you have booted ubuntu, you also need to

 sudo apt-get install tftp

for this to work.

Finally, make sure your device really does have a label OLPCRoot. I don't think that is emphasized enough in the instructions.

With these considerations, the install actually went very smoothly. I am just afraid my 256MB OLPC may be too small for ubuntu lucid.

Two things that don't work: the wireless network and the battery icon. Battery is not such a big deal. For the wireless network, I may need a new driver, because no wireless networks are detected.

I hope this helps others!

Edo 19:05, 24 April 2010 (UTC)

Thanks for your input! I added the missing sudos, and tried to emphasize the disk label issue a little more.

As for the wireless, I had the same problem until i figured out the firmware issue. The driver should already be there. What does "dmesg | grep 8388" say?

I'm aware that the battery indicator doesn't work; I'm not sure that the XO provides this information by ACPI. In my previous Ubuntu system, I wrote a shellscript that dug out the battery percentage from somewhere in /proc, and displayed it in a custom text-based taskbar widget. Other similar things, such as screen brightness and mapping of the directional/game buttons also need some work.

I'll look into this when I revise the instructions for the stable 10.04 version, which will be released soon.

-- Maxxflow 19:53, 24 April 2010 (UTC)