Puppy on "One Laptop Per Child" OLPC?

Using applications, configuring, problems
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PlatonicPimp
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#21 Post by PlatonicPimp »

Come on, I love Puppy, and I love my new XO. Don't make me choose between the two.

What, precisely, prevents us from booting puppy from a stick? Or even a external cdrom attached via USB?

From there, how do we enable the special hardware options of the XO? The built in camera, the Wireless mesh networking, the brightness adjusters? According to a thread I found here (http://olpcnews.com/forum/index.php?topic=592.0), it seems to be as simple in many cases as finding the proper command and binding it to the key, but I have to admit I'm not savvy enough to completely follow the conversation.

Then, we can worry about installing it to the hard drive.

I only know enough linux to grasp basic concepts and follow directions. I also know this will take a lot of experimenting on someone's part. Since no-one seems to be chomping at the bit to give it a go for the shear challenge of it, what incentive can I and others offer to see this get taken on? I will do whatever I can to assist on this project.
I am running Buddapup 4.00 on an Itronix gobook 1 with an intel 85 processer and 256 MB ram, and an old desktop who's stats I completely don't know. In both cases I boot from CD at all times. I'm desperately trying to get this to work on an OLPC.

raffy
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one answer

#22 Post by raffy »

I gave you one answer here. :oops:

Thanks for your enthusiasm - Happy New Year!
Puppy user since Oct 2004. Want FreeOffice? [url=http://puppylinux.info/topic/freeoffice-2012-sfs]Get the sfs (English only)[/url].

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mdd
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Re: same here

#23 Post by mdd »

raffy wrote:You just posted what I was thinking. :)

Barry Kauler Address: PO Box 359 Perenjori WA 6620 Australia

He is currently building Dingo (Puppy4) and including both the Intel Classmate and eeePC in the detection routine. If he gets an OPLC unit, that will be an excellent addition to his laboratory. See http://puppylinux.com/blog/
OK. I sent it out via Express Mail today. They said it would get there by about Jan 14th.

--MDD

PlatonicPimp
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#24 Post by PlatonicPimp »

Heh, "whatever I can" does not include shipping away a new laptop a week after I get it. It was far too great a financial outlay for me. Thank you mdd for doing what I could not and sending an XO to Barry. May your praises be sung.

As I posted in that other thread, user rkevans on the OLPCNews forums apparently is working towards this as well, perhaps efforts can be coordinated. http://olpcnews.com/forum/index.php?topic=574.0

I'll happily subject my XO to beta testing builds and the like. I can't think of much other than that. You are right, raffy, I'm enthusiastic but mostly useless. :oops:
I am running Buddapup 4.00 on an Itronix gobook 1 with an intel 85 processer and 256 MB ram, and an old desktop who's stats I completely don't know. In both cases I boot from CD at all times. I'm desperately trying to get this to work on an OLPC.

raffy
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?

#25 Post by raffy »

You are right, raffy
Huh - I've never said anything yet. :lol:
Puppy user since Oct 2004. Want FreeOffice? [url=http://puppylinux.info/topic/freeoffice-2012-sfs]Get the sfs (English only)[/url].

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BarryK
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Re: same here

#26 Post by BarryK »

mdd wrote:OK. I sent it out via Express Mail today. They said it would get there by about Jan 14th.
mdd, that's incredible! I guess from your post about all the baby laptops you own, you're not short of a dollar or two. But, anyway, if I get Puppy running on it, I'll send it back for your daughter to use.
[url]https://bkhome.org/news/[/url]

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mdd
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Re: same here

#27 Post by mdd »

BarryK wrote:
mdd wrote:OK. I sent it out via Express Mail today. They said it would get there by about Jan 14th.
mdd, that's incredible! I guess from your post about all the baby laptops you own, you're not short of a dollar or two. But, anyway, if I get Puppy running on it, I'll send it back for your daughter to use.
No need. I had three of them. Please keep it. With all you've done for us, it would be my pleasure.

--MDD

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Lobster
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#28 Post by Lobster »

8) There you are in a developing country (not the poorest) and the schooling system provide books in the form of a little green laptop.

Now as geeks we might have preferences. Kids adapt to what they have. Sugar is sweet and the commercial arena is providing its own saccharine . . .

Those kids will experiement. Even a hint of a Puppy hiding in their laptop and they might be tempted . . .

Sugar uses Python, a great usable language (for kids and beginners)

Barry has done a 15 minute review of the OLPC laptop on his Blog. I hope in the future more time (yep I am still trying to compress more time into less space) will be available.

Given time everything changes (I read that on a cereal packet) 8)
Puppy Raspup 8.2Final 8)
Puppy Links Page http://www.smokey01.com/bruceb/puppy.html :D

cthisbear
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#29 Post by cthisbear »

mdd :
" OLPC donation received
January 18th, 2008

I would like to thank Mike (’mdd’ in the Puppy Forum) for sending me a OLPC XO laptop to get Puppy running on it. That is extremely generous, as Mike purchased it then sent it to me — actually, he bought 3, or was that 6 due to the buy-2 plan?. I have the green one: "


Good one Mike.

Chris

rrolsbe
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Re: One to Barry - would leave two

#30 Post by rrolsbe »

I followed the instruction to install Debian on my XO, It trys to boot but errors out before completion. Does this work on the XO's with the native 650 build? I believe Ivan had version 653.

While waiting for Puppy for the XO, might learn something using Debian.

I also want to thank mdd for the donation of one of his XO's. I was not that generous but I did make my second donation to Barry hoping he might port Puppy to the XO.

Regards
Ron
BlackAdder wrote:If you send one to Barry, that would leave you with a couple to experiment with. And you might like to try this until the arrival of a Puppy version that uses all the capability of the XO.
While waiting for the servers to finish churning last night, I put
together an UNOFFICIAL Debian "etch" 4.0 + XFCE4 build for the XO. It
includes Firefox, Thunderbird, a suite of development tools (python,
git, gcc, gdb, flex, bison, automake, autoconf, libtool), a music
player (XMMS), IRC client (irssi) and a graphical wireless AP
selector. The entire build takes up 250MB of flash. I optimized the
Firefox window layout to give you maximum screen estate, and
configured a number of keyboard shortcuts. Feedback welcome. Standard
disclaimer applies.


How to install
--------------

1. download the following two files to a USB stick:

<http://radian.org/~krstic/etch-xfce.tar>
<http://radian.org/~krstic/etch-xfce-home.tar>

2. get a developer key, disable security
3. boot the normal build, switch to tty1 (ctrl+alt+f1), become root
4. mount the USB key if not automounted; let's say it's mounted at /
media/KEY
4. # cd /versions/pristine; tar xf /media/KEY/etch-xfce.tar
5. # cd /home/olpc; tar xf /media/KEY/etch-xfce-home.tar
6. # cp -rl /versions/pristine/debian /versions/run/debian
7. # /usr/sbin/setattr -R --iunlink /versions/run/debian
8. # ln -s /versions/pristine/debian /versions/boot/alt
9. # sync
10. Power off the XO. Power on and immediately hold the 'O' game key
(right hand side of the screen.

Boot should now proceed to a blue-background login screen. Log in as
user 'olpc' with password 'olpc' -- that user has sudo access. Give
XFCE a bit of time to load, and voila! Use the keyboard shortcuts
below for some of the most useful options. Note that Firefox can take
up to 15-20s to load after you start it, and you won't see a progress
indication on the screen; that's expected. Also, you don't need to
hold the 'O' key to boot into Debian next time; it'll be the default.
Holding the key will get you back to the regular Sugar build.


Keyboard shortcuts
------------------

- Ctrl+alt+w -- wireless AP picker
- Ctrl+alt+t -- xterm (also alt+`)
- Ctrl+alt+f -- firefox
- Ctrl+alt+b -- thunderbird
- Ctrl+alt+x -- xmms

Enjoy,

--
Ivan Krsti? <krstic@solarsail.hcs.harvard.edu> | http://radian.org
Ivan Kristic is a member of the OLPC team, and the above is from a post to the OLPC developer list.

BTW, have you tried mesh networking your XO's? If you connect one to an ethernet router port, they can all access the web via the mesh (according to material about school servers).

A green (and white) with envy BlackAdder.

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BarryK
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#31 Post by BarryK »

rrolsbe,
Have you looked into whether the OLPC boots off an external USB drive? Maybe this has already been discussed, but I'm coming into this subject cold.
The Classmate was a pushover, as it is very conventional, an ordinary BIOS that I was able to configure to recognise external USB pen drive or CD drive.
[url]https://bkhome.org/news/[/url]

raffy
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OFW

#32 Post by raffy »

BlackAdder posted previously about the Open Firm Ware FAQ:
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OFW_FAQ

rrolsbe
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Booting from external USB and SD Cards

#33 Post by rrolsbe »

Barry

You may have seen my post in this thread regarding running Debian on the XO. When I first scanned the instructions for doing so, I assumed Debian would be running from the USB stick; however, the USB stick is only being used to store the downloaded tar files that are ultimately transferred into the XO's internal NAND JFFS2 file system. Not sure why Ivan did not gzip the two tar files to reduce the file download time??

From what I have read online, I believe the XO is capable of booting from many external USB sources. The stickler is figuring out how to make it work with the non-standard OFW bios.

With X-Mas, the passing of my Step-Dad and work, I have not had much time to pursue booting other OSes on my XO.

Glad to hear you received your donated XO. I have only read about the new ASUS laptop, but from what I can deduce, the hardware on the XO has some unique features the ASUS doesn't have. The XO also makes a great bookreader for the same cash outlay as a Kindle.

Regards
Ron

PS.. I only use the XO keyboard and mouse pad when I am truly portable. An external keyboard and mouse work great. I have a very small external USB mouse and plan to buy a small folding keyboard. ALSO, load up the Opera Browser ported to the XO you will be glad you did!

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prehistoric
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hacking OLPC

#34 Post by prehistoric »

This article was just slashdoted. http://www.geek.com/feature-hacking-the-xo-laptop/

PlatonicPimp
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#35 Post by PlatonicPimp »

Ubuntu has already been hacked to work on the XO, perhaps reading these or contacting their authors will assist.

http://www.freelikegnu.org/?p=21

Admittedly, I can't follow it myself, so I have no idea if it's useful to you.

http://olpcnews.com/forum/index.php?topic=1436.0

If I'm following what's going on there correctly, they've ported the special bits to the kernel, recompiled, and then shared the files so others can download their special modified kernel. Maybe that's all it takes?

And in those instances XO is decidedly booting from the USB. Some people have reported success booting from and SD card as well, but others have reported resounding, drive reformatting failure.
I am running Buddapup 4.00 on an Itronix gobook 1 with an intel 85 processer and 256 MB ram, and an old desktop who's stats I completely don't know. In both cases I boot from CD at all times. I'm desperately trying to get this to work on an OLPC.

Sage
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#36 Post by Sage »

The Hacao story on DWW:
http://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20080121
is worth reading.

jonyo

#37 Post by jonyo »

Thx for the link.

rrolsbe
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I firmly believe Puppy will perform better that Ubuntu on XO

#38 Post by rrolsbe »

I posted this to the following web page discussing running Ubuntu from a USB stick.

http://www.olpcnews.com/software/operat ... aptop.html

Thanks for information on running Ubuntu from a USB/SD device. I have not tried Ubuntu on my XO yet but plan to do so. Since I have not tried it yet, some of my observations and questions might be obvious.

Observations and food for thought for this documented implementation.

After boot, does Ubuntu run entirely or partially from physical RAM? Or is it accessing executables from USB/SD flash? Are the files on the flash compressed? For example with 256MB of RAM, Puppy Linux can load and run entirely from a squash file system resident in physical RAM. Puppy also sets up SWAP in RAM. One of my main concerns using low end compute devices such as the XO is minimizing application launch time. Running entirely from a squash file system resident in RAM is fast but slows down on low end compute devices due to the horsepower required to decompress the executables. My guess is launching executables resident on a fairly fast flash device, whether compress or not, would not be any faster than launching the same executable from a squash file system resident in physical RAM. Looks like some XO application launch time testing might be in order.

Here are some but not all of the variables to consider:

The speed of the USB/SD flash being used.
The speed of the USB/SD interface.
The speed of the physical RAM.
The processor speed.
Whether compression is being use and what type of compression.
What other processes might be using processor resources.
Etc.

I am very excited at the prospect of running Ubuntu from a USB device but, at least from what I know, Puppy should perform better due to it being designed from the ground up to run on low end compute hardware and having the capability to run totally out of 256MB of RAM. I am also aware the the baseline install of Puppy doesn't offer everything Ubuntu offers; however, I am quite happy with what Puppy offers for lower end compute platforms such as the XO.

Here to running as many OSes as possible on the XO!

Thanks for your read time!
Regards
Ron

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BarryK
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#39 Post by BarryK »

None of the information I have read so far really properly describes how to boot any variety of Linux off an external USB stick.
[url]https://bkhome.org/news/[/url]

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BlackAdder
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USB Boot

#40 Post by BlackAdder »

Barry,
I presume you have read this page. http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OFW_FAQ
I read it to say that boot from USB should work if you have /boot/vmlinuz and /boot/initrd.img on the USB device. Might initrd.gz need to be changed perhaps?

HTH

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