Ready-made kernel, XO-1, Xubuntu, and initrd questions

[Alec Muffett]

Hi!

I have a G1G1-era XO-1 and am trying to put Xubuntu onto it, using
Virtualbox to do the setup and build on OSX, and then dd'ing the raw
image to a 4Gb SD-card for booting. I'm using the current
Xubuntu-alternate CD to build the image, and then approximately
following the Wiki at
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Ubuntu_Lucid_on_OLPC_XO regards getting a
kernel installed.

At first I used the wiki instructions to pick a kernel from
http://dev.laptop.org/~kernels/olpc-2.6.31-xo1/ - from this directory
I chose:

    vmlinuz-2.6.35_xo1-20100827.0009.1.olpc.e8a1b0f901cd2b3

...and following the instructions got my XO1 to boot successfully to a
GUI login, but it would be unusable because during boot it would
complain about not finding "/lib/modules/<VERSION>+" - with a trailing
"+" character - and thereby could not get at trackpad or usb-mouse
drivers.  I checked this with Chris Ball and he said that the "+"
represented a dirty kernel tree, which makes sense - but means that
the wiki instructions won't work for initrd building, since the
/lib/modules/<VERSION> directory won't match the kernels "<VERSION>+"
build.

This also made me think I was barking up the wrong tree; so I tried a
different directory:

    http://dev.laptop.org/~kernels/public_rpms/f14-xo1/

...and installing the most recent kernel from _that_ actually provides
me with a initrd-image file ... except that the initrd is incomplete
and booting it causes "/lib/modules: no such file or directory" ...and
my attempts to reconstruct a initrd _for_ that kernel have been klunky
failures.

So at Chris' suggestion, I thought I would ask: Is there a place I can
get a ready-made kernel which contains all the necessary XO1 drivers
and a working initrd, or at lease an initrd which can be poked
trivially to make it work for Xubuntu, please?

Ideally I am looking to use the XO for wireless geomapping research,
so promisc-mode drivers and a loadable bluetooth-dongle stack are
desirable features. :-)

[I promise to document the build once I get it running.]

Many thanks!

-a