{"id":372,"date":"2006-02-21T00:58:37","date_gmt":"2006-02-21T05:58:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bytebot.net\/blog\/?p=372"},"modified":"2008-01-30T20:09:28","modified_gmt":"2008-01-31T01:09:28","slug":"one-laptop-per-child","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.bytebot.net\/blog\/archives\/2006\/02\/21\/one-laptop-per-child","title":{"rendered":"One Laptop Per Child"},"content":{"rendered":"

There was a request to take a gander at the $100 Laptop: One Laptop Per Child (OLPC)<\/a>, and reading Fedora People recently made me want to snap up the opportunity to give it a go. Here are my first impressions on the emulator, known as the OLPC SDK<\/a>, by Daniel Berrange.<\/p>\n

Installation, if instructions are followed on FC-4 work fine. There are spec files to rebuild for FC-5. During the bootup sequence, I noticed that LVM was starting up, and finding no volume groups – can’t this be disabled? There doesn’t seem to be a use for LVM on the OLPC.<\/p>\n

Once you get past the fairly slow emulator startup (its qemu based), you’ll notice that at the heart of it, you’ve got FC-5 sitting there. Very sexy<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Looking for a terminal? While gnome-terminal isn’t supplied (and probably will never be), xterm is there for the moment. Alt+F2, xterm, and you’re on your way. The root user has no password, so su – shouldn’t be a problem.<\/p>\n

What doesn’t work with the olpc-2006_02_06_16_08.ext3 firmware image is networking. Try modprobing for ne2k-pci, and it’ll fail, mainly because 8390.ko is missing. This should be fixed with the next firmware image.<\/p>\n

All’s not lost however. If you run file on the .ext3 firmware image, you’ll notice that it contains an x86 boot sector, code offset 0x48. A little fdisk, will show that there are 63 sectors\/track, with each sector size being 512 bytes. Multiply that, get 32256, and that should be the offset to mounting the image.<\/p>\n

sudo \/sbin\/losetup -o 32256 \/dev\/loop0 olpc-2006_02_06_16_08.ext3<\/code>
\nsudo mount -t ext3 \/dev\/loop0\/mnt<\/code>
\nmerrily going on making changes<\/em>
\nsudo umount \/mnt<\/code>
\nsudo \/sbin\/losetup -d \/dev\/loop0<\/code><\/p>\n

Its well worthwhile to not have QEMU running with the disk image – make sure it isn’t, otherwise corruption is likely. Once that happened, it was fairly trivial to get MySQL installed. So I did.<\/p>\n

<\/a>
\nMySQL running on the OLPC<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

The question is… do we want 61MB of a package sitting there? It can probably be reduced in size tremendously. So can removal of \/var\/log and \/etc\/yum.repos.d\/ and so on…<\/p>\n

From reading the software task list<\/a>, it doesn’t seem like there’s a focus on teaching IT to the owners of the OLPC. Does MySQL pass off as educational software, covering a database component? I don’t see OpenOffice.org being listed as something that will be on the OLPC, and the GNOME Office (Abiword and Gnumeric) don’t have a front-end for database connectivity.<\/p>\n

I’d like to thank davidz and Daniel Berrange<\/a> for assistance when needed! Oh and read his blog for little tips – the simulator debugging<\/a> did come in handy.<\/p>\n

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