Updating old 656 qemu image

[Ton van Overbeek]

2008/12/8 Luis Michelena <luis.michelena at gmail.com>:
> I have been working since may with qemu, using the 656 build, made some
> changes, intalled several packages to make my life a little easier(man,
> locate, locale, etc) so i'd like to be able to update it in place but I
> can't:
>
.... <snip> ...
> I tried to update de olpc-update script to the last version, but it didn´t
> work. By the way, the /versions folder is empty. It seems that that folder
> should have a link(current) to another directory that contains the version
> hash, but i couldn't find which value to use? I tried to search snippets of
> the error log on the net some sensible options but I found none
> Can you give me some advice?
> I also downloaded the 708 build, but i didn't found a way to acomplish the
> update that way either.

olpc-update does not work for ext3 images as used by qemu. It is dependent on
the flash layout where you can boot from either the current or the
previous version.
(That is where the /versions/... tree is for).
I am not aware of a way to update the qemu image in place.
What you could do is to save the /home/olpc tree outside qemu, then
replace the image by the one from a more recent build and restore (parts of)
your saved /home/olpc tree into the new image.

Two caveats:
Activities are stored in a different location now (everything under /home/olpc
instead of /usr/share/activities and /home/olpc) and activity isolation is now
enforced. You need to start from scratch with activities for any recent build:
update.1 (8.1, build 703) and 8.2.0 (build 767).
Also Update.1 and 8.2.0 are based on fedora 9 and require 3DNow
instruction emulation
in qemu. A stock qemu 0.9.1 will not be able to boot a fedora 9 based XO image.
For windows there is a svn based version which does work.
See  http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Using_QEMU_on_Windows_XP, especially the remark
under "Option 2) QEMU Manager for beginners" regarding recent builds.

Good luck with qemu.

Ton van Overbeek