Installing XO1.5

[James Cameron]

On Wed, Aug 11, 2010 at 05:37:45AM -0700, john espiro wrote:
> First, if I am posting to the wrong list, can someone let me know
> which list I should post to?  There were dozens of them and I thought
> this might be the best one.

This one seems appropriate for the time being.

> I am trying to install XO1.5 (the latest stable) into Vmware.

Good.  I don't think anybody has done this yet; nobody has spoken or
written about it, and it might take a fair amount of work.

Most people who want to use Sugar in a VMware guest would use one of the
Sugar on a Stick builds.  See http://sugarlabs.org/ for more details.
There are Sugar mailing lists too.  Activities can be developed in this
environment for deployment to XO-1.5 laptops.

The reason work would be required to get an XO-1.5 operating system
working in VMware is that VMware does not provide the OpenFirmware
booting environment expected by the XO-1.5 operating system.  One would
have to retrofit a bootloader into the filesystem of the operating
system; a bootloader that works with VMware.

> Is this the latest 1.5 release: 
> http://download.laptop.org/xo-1.5/os/official/latest/4GB/ ?

Yes, at time of writing this is the latest official release (build os206
in release 10.1.1).  For development builds that are leading up to the
next official release, read the draft release notes:

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Release_notes/10.1.2

> Is there any documentation available to get XO installed into vmware?

There is old documentation that may not work on our Wiki.  Such as

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/VMware
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Emulating_the_XO/Help_and_tips
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User_Feedback_on_Images
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Emulating_the_XO/Quick_Start/Mac

There is documentation about GNU GRUB which is a bootloader typically
used for booting Linux on VMware.  It is at gnu.org or on Wikipedia.

> When I tried booting up an ISO, it couldn't find a bootloader, so I
> must be missing something...

GNU GRUB is intentionally removed during our build of the XO-1.5
operating system.  This is handled by
olpc-os-builder.git/modules/base/kspkglist.10.core.inc which contains
the line "-grub".

-- 
James Cameron
http://quozl.linux.org.au/