Replicating XO experience in a VM

[Peter Robinson]

Hi Sridhar,

On Sun, May 15, 2011 at 3:41 PM, Sridhar Dhanapalan
<sridhar at laptop.org.au> wrote:
> 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.

I suggest you look at the olpc-os-builder. Its pacakged in Fedora. Its
also the series of scripts used to build the releases.

The major difference between a XO image and any other image is the
files produced at the end. I don't believe it would be hard to either
A) extract the OS ext3 file system of an XO 1.5 and add it to a VM
image or b) add a plugin to the scripts that produce something that
can be imported into a VM.

Peter