December 28, 2008

• Installing Ubuntu on an OLPC XO laptop

  Things you need:

  • XO laptop!
  • >= 2GB SD Card (I used a 16 GB card from Transcend - no issues.)
  • >= 300MB USB stick
  • a bittorrent client

  1. Get a Developer Key - this takes at least a day (for no apparent reason) so do it first.
  2. Get the Sugar install totally up to date. Including the applications. I tried to not do the apps first time around and I suspect this is why I was having some necessary unix commands not found. This totally doesn't work if sfdisk is hiding.  If you accidentally close the "update apps" bar on startup, it's in the new Sugar control panel (one of the options under your center icon.)
  3. Follow the directions. (This includes downloading a torrent of the starter ubuntu files.) If things go pear shaped in the middle, rebooting and starting over seemed to work ok for me. I got as far as "Make the partition table" and had to start over because the silly thing wouldn't unmount the SD card. It was scary, but it did work out ok.

  The directions on the forum are really good. I think the only thing that killed me was the lack of explanation that you really need to update Sugar first. (They hint that part of this is getting the SD support up to date, which seems pretty important.)
   

  • 11:14 am
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