rootninja

There’s a few guides in the XO Hacks forum on the OLPC News site. I’ve done this once already, and i’m about to do it a second time, but it’s been awhile and I didn’t take any notes before. So this time I’ll document as I go.

I see lots of people getting stuck on the tune2fs part. I ran into this problem with one USB disk and wrote zero’s to it first, tried again, and it was fine. The other disk worked fine the first time. But first you need to apply for a developer key.

In the browser on the XO, follow the “Developer key request” link.

All production XO laptops have firmware security enabled when you receive them. This includes laptops obtained through the Give One, Get One program. The process took a day or so from the time I sent the request until the key was “ready”. OLPC produces many unsigned operating system images for development and testing, which will only work in your laptop if you have a developer key. The firmware will look for a developer key in the internal flash memory, USB flash drive, or an SD card that’s plugged in. It needs to be in /security.

Get the Ubuntu image.

http://torrents.thepiratebay.org/4002328/OLPCRoot.tar.bz2.4002328.TPB.torrent

Unpack it from the archive

You want to end up with the OLPCRoot.raw image.====

# tar xjvf OLPCRoot.tar.bz2

Write the image to your USB disk.

My USB disk showed up as “sdf” on my desktop pc running Linux, so i’ll use that in the example. Just make sure you’re using the right device. Fair warning.

# time dd bs=1M if=OLPCRoot.raw of=/dev/sdf
1500+0 records in
1500+0 records out
1572864000 bytes (1.6 GB) copied, 110.697 s, 14.2 MB/s

Run tune2fs

# tune2fs /dev/sdf1 -L OLPCRoot

If you get errors here, write zero’s to the disk first. That fixed it for me.

Plug in your USB disk to the XO.

Because you labeled the file system OLPCRoot, it will mount at /media/OLPCRoot/

Now go to the XO laptop and run the following from the shell:

The shell can be reached by pushing ctrl-alt and a function key.

cp -ra /boot /media/OLPCRoot/
cp -ra /lib/modules /media/OLPCRoot/lib/
cp -ra /lib/firmware /media/OLPCRoot/lib/
cp -ra /security /media/OLPCRoot/
cd /media/OLPCRoot/etc
mv modprobe.d modprobe.old
cp -ra /etc/modprobe.d /media/OLPCRoot/etc/modprobe.d
mv fstab fstab.old
cp -ar /etc/fstab /media/OLPCRoot/etc/fstab
cd X11
mv xorg.conf xorg.conf.old
wget http://dev.laptop.org/~cscott/xorg.conf
cd /media/OLPCRoot/boot
mv olpc.fth olpc.fth.nand

Setup the bootloader to allow dual boot

http://olpcnews.com/forum/index.php?topic=1525.0 has instructions on how to set up the bootloader to multiboot.