VMware

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Emulation with VMWare

VMWare (Workstation, Player) is an emulator released as commercial software. The player version is distributed free of charge (Gratis). It runs on either Win32 or Linux host machines, allowing you to run OLPC images within the virtual machine. A Mac version is also in development.

Compatibility

  • Official OLPC build 557 is known to work under VMWare with networking (tested on Linux AMD64 host). A kernel driver (Ensoniq ES1371) is missing from the images to allow sound support.
  • Fedora 7 (with some hiccups) and Ubuntu Feisty both run under VMWare, you can thus use VMWare to create a sugar-jhbuild developer's desktop environment (recommended only for those wishing to do work on the core software.

Caveats

  • You will need to use ssh, rsync, or another standard Unix mechanism to share files with the image under the Player version of the software.
  • On Linux, VMWare setup requires a package of kernel modules

Setup

  • Download an official devel-ext3 image (<thefile>.img.bz2)
  • bunzip2 <thefile>.img.bz2
  • use the qemu-img function from Qemu to convert the image into a vmdk file
    • qemu-img convert <thefile>.img -O vmdk <thefile>.vmdk

Now create a new VMWare "Machine":

  • "New Virtual Machine", "Typical", OS Type "Other Linux 2.6.x kernel"
  • Network Address Translation (NAT) networking (recommended, try others if you like)
  • Disk configuration (irrelevant, we're going to overwrite it)

Edit "Machine" Settings:

  • Memory 512MB (recommended for development work, 256 more closely simulates an XO)
  • Remove the auto-generated hard-disk
  • Add a new hard disk, "Existing Disk Image", choose <thfile>.vmdk
  • Ensure that audio is enabled

Configure

Once you have booted the machine, you will need to specify a name for yourself and choose an XO colour. You will then need to configure the collaboration server. To do this, pull up the developer's console, and use the "vi" editor to change the configuration file ~/.sugar/default/config to change the "server=" line to "server=olpc.collabora.co.uk".

When this is done, reboot. The virtual XO should now have networking support and should show you a network view with other XOs logged on.

See Also

  • VirtualBox is an emulation system with similar performance and usage
  • Qemu is an Open Source emulation system
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