[Olpc-open] DebXO 0.5 release

[Andres Salomon]

Hi,

I've just built and tagged DebXO 0.5.  I had to put this out sooner than
I'd anticipated due to an OFW upgrade that broke things.  It doesn't have
some of the features I'd wanted to have in 0.5, so they'll have to come later.

DebXO is a version of Debian (testing) that is customized for the XO-1
hardware.

The release can be found here:

http://lunge.mit.edu/~dilinger/debxo-latest/images/


CHANGES:

 - OFW q2e30+ freezes the DCON on boot, so DebXO's olpc.fth now unfreezes
   it.  If you upgraded your machine to q2e30 and it looked like DebXO no
   longer worked.. this version of DebXO will work.  Alternatively, you can
   just edit your /boot/olpc.fth to add the line "dcon-unfreeze" before the
   "boot" line.

 - The Sugar desktop has gotten an upgrade, from Sugar 0.81 to 0.82.

 - There's a new XFCE desktop, courtesy of Erik Garrison.

 - Desktops will now auto-start X.  Gdm and Kdm have been dropped from
   the images.  If you want them back, just 'apt-get remove autox' and
   'apt-get install gdm' (or kdm).

Other changes can be seen at:
http://lunge.mit.edu/cgi-bin/gitweb.cgi?p=xodist;a=summary


INSTALLATION ONTO NAND FLASH:

To install onto the XO's NAND flash, download the jffs2/$DESKTOP.dat
and jffs2/$DESKTOP.img to a USB or SD stick (where $DESKTOP is
one of the various desktops - gnome, kde, lxde, sugar, base, or
awesome). Boot into OFW (make sure your XO is unlocked!), and run

update-nand disk:\$DESKTOP.img

or

update-nand sd:\$DESKTOP.img

(depending upon whether you downloaded to an SD or USB disk).

If update-nand spits out any errors, make sure you're running an
appropriately up-to-date version of OFW.  The q2d* series do not
support update-nand, and versions q2e18 and q2e19 are known to be buggy
with partitions.  Firmware and instructions for upgrading
can be found here:

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Firmware


INSTALLATION ONTO SD/USB:

To install onto an SD or USB device, download the
ext3/debxo-$DESKTOP.ext3.img.gz file, and run

zcat debxo-$DESKTOP.ext3.img.gz > /dev/mmcblk0

or

zcat debxo-$DESKTOP.ext3.img.gz > /dev/sdX

(depending upon whether you're writing to an SD or USB disk).  Note
that this will overwrite any data that is on the SD or USB disk.


USAGE:

By default, a user 'olpc' is created (with no password, and sudo
access).  Some desktops automatically start a display manager and log
you in; some do not.  The root password is disabled by default.  This
is a stock Debian Lenny system with only a few modifications, so it can
obviously be tailored.


HACKING:

xodist is the name of the collection of scripts that are used to
produce DebXO.  The git repository can be downloaded via:

git clone git://lunge.mit.edu/git/xodist

There's also a web interface to that:

http://lunge.mit.edu/cgi-bin/gitweb.cgi?p=xodist;a=summary

Help is always appreciated.  The roadmap for future releases can be found
here:

http://lunge.mit.edu/cgi-bin/gitweb.cgi?p=xodist;a=blob;f=TODO


Enjoy!