Replicating XO experience in a VM

[Sridhar Dhanapalan]

I've been investigating ways to replicate an XO's experience in a
virtual machine (VirtualBox), so that it can be run on other computers
without requiring an XO. Our OS is a variant of OLPC OS 10.1.3, so I'm
trying to replicate that.

We determined that booting the XO image directly does not work. Sugar
on a Stick might be a good start. Drawbacks are that we would have to
use v1 (Strawberry), and the Sugar 0.84 present in Strawberry is not
the same as the one in the OLPC OS (a lot of changes have been made).

My experimentation has been to install the OLPC packages (carefully
avoiding the kernel) on top of a standard Fedora 11 install. I can get
it to load to the Sugar name screen. If you enter a name and select
your colours, you are prompted for them again. It does not proceed to
the Home View.

My method and findings are documented here:
http://dev.laptop.org.au/projects/xo-au/wiki/Virtual_machine

I feel that I am tantalisingly close, and I'd appreciate some
assistance with this. I feel that a working VM solution can be of
great benefit to the community.

If it helps, I can put my VM image up for download and inspection.

Thanks,
Sridhar


Sridhar Dhanapalan
Technical Manager
One Laptop per Child Australia
M: +61 425 239 701
E: sridhar at laptop.org.au
A: G.P.O. Box 731
     Sydney, NSW 2001
W: www.laptop.org.au