I’m trying to get the virtual one-laptop-per-child running on my one-laptop-per-privileged-person computer. It looks like it won’t be too difficult, and you might want to do it, too. So here are my notes.

Setting up the virtual machine¶

I’m following the handy getting started docs from IBM:

(I’m using Ubuntu 7.1-Gutsy)

sudo apt-get install qemu

Then download a disk image from http://olpc.download.redhat.com/olpc/streams/development/latest/devel_ext3/ - I’m trying this one but it’s not clear if that is the right thing to do.

Looks like this doc has some more details:

Go to http://xs-dev.laptop.org/cscott/olpc/streams/ship.2/latest/devel_ext3/ and obtain the numbered -devel_ext3.img.bz2 and its md5. Sometimes builds don’t work in qemu. See Emulating the XO for recommendations.

To check the md5 hash:

md5sum -c olpc-redhat-stream-development-build-602-20070920_2254-devel_ext3.img.bz2.md5
bzcat olpc-redhat-stream-development-build-602-20070920_2254-devel_ext3.img.bz2 > xo-602a.img

As for running the virtual machine,
bc. qemu xo-625.img
has done something, although something much more complicated is recommended.

THIS DOES SOMETHING. But something really slow…

Faster with kqemu¶

There is something called kqemu that should make things go faster. Installing the package didn’t make it work, though, so i’m trying a more complicated procedure from here

Now, the magic words from here are:
bc. qemu -kernel-kqemu -serial `tty` -redir tcp:2221::22 -soundhw es1370 -net user -net nic,model=rtl8139 -hda xo-625.img

(Alt version for 64-bit machine)

export $PORT = 2221
qemu-system-x86_64 -kernel-kqemu -serial `tty` -redir tcp:$PORT::22 -soundhw es1370 -net user -net nic,model=rtl8139 -hda xo-602a.img

That worked. Is it fast? Much faster. Maybe usable…