Replicating XO experience in a VM

[Martin Langhoff]

On Sun, May 15, 2011 at 10:41 AM, 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.

About one year ago, I prepared a SoaS image matching roughly the user
experience of OLPC's 10.1.1 . I did that by taking the build scripts
for the closest SoaS I could find, and tweaking them.

I don't have the URLs right now, but I posted a few times to the soas
mailing list asking for help, and later with the end results. The
archive of the soas ml should have the info you're after. I probably
crossposted to sugar-devel too.

Of course, you'll want to update it to 10.1.3 and newer activities. If
it works, let us know :-)

About your current effort...

> 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.

You are right, it seems you're very close. You seem to have olpc-utils
installed, so Sugar starts.

When it takes your name, it's trying to write it -- there's a good
chance that it's failing to write it, can you get logs from that?
It'll tell you what's broken. My comments (after reading the wikipage
you link)

 - You are creating the olpc user and grp, but not matching uid/gid
(500:500). Some scripts in olpc-utils may be hardcoded...
 - use chkconfig to start the olpc-configure "service" - this
preconfigures /home/olpc . It will probably also mess up your keyboard
map :-/
 - you may need to kill/remove/uninstall pulseaudio

hth,



m
-- 
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 martin at laptop.org -- Software Architect - OLPC
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