Virtual terminal

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If Sugar is broken or the Terminal activity will not start, you can switch to a virtual terminal (for looking through your filesystem and typing in commands) by:

  • on builds prior to 11.3.0, type Ctrl-alt-Neighborhood (Neighborhood is the same as F1 on a normal keyboard, and looks like this: Mesh key f1 small.png, or
  • on builds in 11.3.0 and later, type Ctrl-alt-f2,
  • your screen will become white text on a black background.
  • hitting Enter (may have to do this twice) - the screen will print something like:
OLPC build 653 (stream ship.2; variant devel_jffs2)
Kernel 2.6.22-20071121.7.olpc.af3dd731d18bc39 on an i586
xo-05-29-d2 login:
  • type "root" (no quotes)
  • hit Enter


You are now root on a virtual terminal and can type commands as you would in Terminal. (Be careful - as root - the superuser - you can do damage to your system, so make sure you know the commands you're typing).

To return to Sugar, logout by typing ctrl-D and then

  • on builds prior to 11.3.0, ctrl-alt-Home - Home is the same as f3 on a normal keyboard and looks like this. Home key f3 small.png,
  • on builds in 11.3.0 and later, type Ctrl-alt-f1, or Ctrl-alt-Neighborhood,

(There is some bug that cause this procedure to fail some of the time. You can type ctrl-alt-Group, then hit return to get the other console running.)