The OLPC SDK comprises a suite of tools to assist 3rd parties who would like to target the OLPC platform. At this time, the core functionality provided in the SDK is a laptop simulator which allows one to run the OS platform firmware images from a regular Fedora Core 4 desktop. The simulator is built on top of the QEMU emulator.
The information contained in this page is now outdated. Current SDK information is now available on the project wiki site. The latest disk images are available from the project download site
These instructions assume the a Fedora Core 4 platform, running the latest kernel (2.6.15-1.1830_FC4). If running a different version of Fedora, or even a different Linux distribution, the source RPMs can be rebuilt as needed.
Install the YUM repository configuration
$ su - # cd /etc/yum.repos.d # wget http://people.redhat.com/berrange/olpc/sdk/olpc-sdk.repo
Install the SDK rpm
# yum install olpc-sdk
If one does not want to use YUM, then the RPMs can be downloaded directly from here
Download the desired OS platform firmware image
$ wget http://people.redhat.com/dcbw/olpc/olpc-2006_02_06_16_08.ext3.gz
Verify the MD5 checksum of the image
$ md5sum olpc-2006_02_06_16_08.ext3.gz a743b35b5908213da3ef5c2ebca1b26d olpc-2006_02_06_16_08.ext3.gz
Uncompress the firmware image (NB the uncompressed ext3 image requires ~1 GB)
$ gunzip olpc-2006_02_06_16_08.ext3.gz
Create a virtual machine in which to run the disk image
$ olpc-simulator create /path/to/olpc-2006_02_06_16_08.ext3 demo
Run the virtual machine
$ olpc-simulator start demo
It is also possible to use the QEMU Admin tool for setting up virtual machines graphically. Instructions are to follow later, however, in the meantime watch a flash movie demoing the process.
Last updated on Monday, Feb 6, 2006