OLPC Laptop in Ubuntu 7.10

This tutorial covers information on how to emulate XO on a typical Linux environment. I will be using Ubuntu Gutsy (7.10) and qemu for emulation.

First we need to get qemu.

sudo apt-get install qemu
sudo apt-get install kqemu-source

Then we need to prepare the module for using accelerated layer qemu (kqemu)

sudo module-assistant prepare
sudo module assistant auto-install kqemu

We make the udev rules so it automatically loads the module. Create the file /etc/udev/rules.d/60-kqemu.rules and write:

KERNEL=="kqemu", NAME="%k", GROUP="kqemu", MODE="0660"

appending a new line.

Add a new group and a new user:

sudo addgroup --system kqemu
sudo adduser $USER kqemu

Login and logout for changes to take effect and then reload the udev daemon:

sudo /etc/init.d/udev reload.

Load the kqemu module itself:

sudo update-modules
sudo modprobe kqemu

Now, get the XO image from the olpc site:

wget http://olpc.download.redhat.com/olpc/streams/development/
LATEST-STABLE-BUILD/devel_ext3/
olpc-redhat-stream-development-devel_ext3.img.bz2

and unpack it:

bunzip2 olpc-redhat-stream-development-devel_ext3.img.bz2

Now make your ram partition bigger

sudo umount /dev/shm
sudo mount -t tmpfs -o size=528m none /dev/shm

And run it:

qemu -m 512 -hda olpc-redhat-stream-development-devel_ext3.img