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one laptop per child livecd downloads

April 12, 2007 in Fedora, GNOME, OLPC, Red Hat | 10 comments

When I asked John to build livecd images the original goal was to have something to take to FISL so that developers could do some development on the laptops. John and Tomeu (one of the other wonderful sugar developers) were going to go down there and hold some tutorials and work with interested developers. But to be honest, I didn’t expect the link to end up on engadget or slashdot, but they did. And I am a bit overwhelmed. The server that the images are hosted on is there for developers to download test images. That server is currently cranking out about 160MB/sec of livecd images (yes, that’s bytes not bits) and is bound by the gigabit NIC that’s in the machine.

John wrote this spiffy little activity launcher for developers that lets them have a little mini-gnome environment to move files around and be able to launch gnome terminals. And it was built using the really nice custom livecd development tools we have as part of the Fedora project. (The implication being that anyone can do this if they want on top of our free tools.) Once he’s back from FISL I’m sure John would love contributions on how to make that environment better for people who want to hack on new activities for the laptop.

I would also love to hear feedback on the images themselves. Did they work in your vmware/qemu/parallels instances? We tend to test them on qemu, but don’t do a lot of testing with other emulators. Plus, it’s probably hard to get networking up and running. Usually you have to switch to the console (ctrl-alt-1 in qemu I believe) and then do an ifup eth0 to get the virtual networking up and running. But feedback is important. What would help let everyone see what the envionment can do? Ask away, this is a good a forum as any. We’ll be generating sdk images for each stable snapshot that we do until production so get your comments in early and often!

Update: I originally posted 122k downloads. That should have been 122k attempts, 13k actual downloads.

  2. Christopher Cook’s avatar

    Christopher Cook on April 13, 2007 at 4:36 pm

    Good stuff. Works using the free Innotek VirtualBox (apart from networking, unless there’s something you need to do to start network working). Sounds etc works fine.

  3. blizzard’s avatar

    blizzard on April 13, 2007 at 4:37 pm

    Not sure about networking. Qemu has an eth0 device that works in the livecd, but you have to start it from the console.

  4. Sitsofe’s avatar

    Sitsofe on April 14, 2007 at 2:47 pm

    Your post lacked a link to the olpc livecd image. It took me ages to find out that they were on the Red Hat server. I’d post the link here but I’m browing this page from the livecd (copy and paste into the web browser field seems to be broken) so I’ll just say try doing a google search for olpc redhat .

    I couldn’t get a gnome-terminal under the GNOME environment so in the end I went to one of the VTs and used DISPLAY=:299 xterm to get a terminal to pop up.

  5. blizzard’s avatar

    blizzard on April 15, 2007 at 8:59 am

    Oops. I added a link there at the beginning for “livecd images.” Thanks for pointing that out!

  6. scribe63’s avatar

    scribe63 on April 16, 2007 at 11:59 am

    Downloaded
    http://olpc.download.redhat.com/olpc/streams/sdk/latest/livecd/olpc-redhat-stream-sdk-livecd.iso
    Upgraded vmware server form 1.0.1 to vmware server 1.0.2.
    Made a new VM to run from livecd iso image. No problem starting up. Only issue, and i’m not sure if it unique to my vmware install, it’s that the screen i rather small.
    I was able to get online, but didn’t hear any sound going the the instruments section. I went back and added the sound adapter for vmware, instruments are now audible. I liked to organ sound a lot. The classic gnome feature feature is awesome.
    Just gotta figure out how to get a higher resolution screen, if possible

  7. Martin van Zanten’s avatar

    Martin van Zanten on April 17, 2007 at 1:16 pm

    Dear Christopher,

    “… But feedback is important. What would help let everyone see what the environment can do? Ask away, this is a good a forum as any…”

    Just keep up the good work!

    I’ll try to make a long story short here: I’m an educator – a little computer savvy, but not enough to hack on the command line. I love how easy it was to set up a Comswiki server on my Mac Mini, and start using it… (or just “Squeak-it” on one of the other major platforms). If it were possible to easily set up a working system on existing infrastructure = school server + some clients – and actually start using it… man, that would help!

    On the long run I see a world where there will be an adoption plan with twin-schools bridging the knowledge&poverty-gap on a one-to-one basis: headmaster-to-headmaster, grade_x_teacher-to-grade_x_teacher, y_year_old-to-y_year_old, etcetera… get the idea?

    Brace yourself for a longterm education programme at all levels, with a lot of stick-to-it-iveness… it won’t just happen by itself!

    If you want me to make it a longer story: just write me…

    Kind regards,

    Martin

  8. Tony Agudo’s avatar

    Tony Agudo on April 17, 2007 at 4:50 pm

    Chris, I was able to get networking going in qemu(via Qemulator) by activating the developer console(pressing alt+0), then switching to the terminal tab and type in this command:

    su -c dhclient