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[Andrew Jensen]

OK, so I've finally got some time and inclination to try getting Puppy to work on the XO. I'm starting this thread because I am a fairly noobish user who's only qualificaiton to take this project on is a willingness to completely mess up multiple times until it works. I intend to document what I'm doing as I do it, as well as ask any questions that come up as I attempt this.

My plan of action is to get a working puppy 4.0 boot for a USB drive first. Then I will clone that to a external hard drive. This is neccessary because the computers that have a working CD-rom can't get the external drive to speed, and vice versa (very frustrating.) Then I will copy over the XO kernel and boot files. Basically, I'm going to try to follow the origional ubuntu install instructions, only with puppy.

What I have to work with:
A 512 MB usb stick.
A 2 gig USB stick
An 80 gig WD passport external hard drive. It has been formatted with a 1 gig bootable ext3 partition, a 1 gig linux swap partition, and a 78 gig fat32 partition.
one XO, currently sans dev key (but that will be fixed as soon as I get near wifi again.) I think it's running release 516.
One rediculously ancient desktop computer. barely runs windows XP. Working CD drive, single USB port that can't power the hard drive, tendency to overheat and shut down spontaneously.
One Itronix gobook laptop. Working CD rom, cannot power HD, no internal hard drive, boots to puppy from CD and I work in RAM.
Work computer. No working CD drive, otherwise the most up-to-date machine I have access to. However, none of my other computers have internet access while I am at work.
Puppy 4.0 on CD, works fine.
Buddapup 4.0 on CD, which is just Puppy with enlightement added. Works fine.

So my first question: Is there a way to copy the whole of my XO's memory to an external drive? I know I need files from it, and I'd prefer to hunt and peck for them in Roxfiler than mess around on the command line. More specifically, is there any reason why I couldn't just cp-r the whole file structure to my flash drive?

[anna]

You can copy your XO using the save-nand command in OFW and create an img file on an external drive.

Then, and I haven't had luck with this, you're supposedly able to mount the jffs2 image on another machine and poke around in it.

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Image_forensics

But, like I said, I've tried following those instructions with no success on either my Mandriva or Fedora boxes.  I hope someone else out there is more helpful.

If you're just wanting to explore and transfer the XO's files from another machine, you could possibly configure boa to do that.  I'm not sure how that works with stuff that belongs to root, though, as there's not really a true "root" user.

http://olpcnews.com/forum/index.php?topic=2792.msg23147#msg23147

Or, you could ssh into your XO and mess around from there, but that doesn't help you avoid command line.

Edit:  this boa.conf edit does let you look at the entire file structure, even the stuff that belongs to root.

http://olpcnews.com/forum/index.php?topic=2792.msg23761#msg23761

[StewieGriffin]

Just a thought here - if I remember correctly, the problem with getting Puppy to work right was due to the machine not being close enough to a PC with the BIOS.  Maybe the latest BIOS download (which can now run WinXP) will help with this process...

[mbs348]

If we could pull this off (and still get wireless to work   ) that would be a real godsend....I think puppy could really be of benefit to this machine

[colinwhipple]

I was surprised at how many different versions of Puppy there are:

http://puppylinux.org/wiki/archives/old-wikka-wikki/categoryderivative/puplets

I use Pupeee on my eeePC and like it a lot.  Very fast.

[Andrew Jensen]

Supposedly, the latest Kernel from Linus has XO support, according to the sources on the puppy forums. Can anyone here confirm this rumor?

[colinwhipple]

Andrew,

I just Googled:

XO Linux kernel

and came up dry in the first four pages of results.

[StewieGriffin]

http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v2.6/ChangeLog-2.6.26

[newbie]

Great! So there IS XO support! Has anyone tried it out yet?

 I could see Puppy Linux being perfect for our little machine (at least until the Ubuntu-Netbook thing comes out).

[Eddie Owens]

Here is another reference on the Puppy Linux Forums:

http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?search_id=1854593737&t=31359

[goney3]

The OLPC wiki was just updated with a lot more information to help get this going: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Olpc.fth

Mitch on the devel mailinglist also gave some insightful advice to another user trying to get a different OS on the xo. Might be good to check out the archives for the past day or two

Best of luck, looking forward to your progress!

[Andrew Jensen]

OK, I finally have a second computer capable of booting a USB stick at my disposal, and I'me going to be taking this up again. News as I have it, but I'm prepping to compile the latest kernel and use it. Which I have never done before. If anyone can give me a general procedure on this, or link me to a good article on how to compile the linux Kernel, I'd be appreciative.

[mbs348]

Look on the puppy forums....I cant remember where i found it, but I believe there is an old guide there.  I am pretty sure the latest linux kernal is said to support the OLPC natively (along with other netboot hardware)  Good Luck!

[goney3]

OK, I finally have a second computer capable of booting a USB stick at my disposal, and I'me going to be taking this up again. News as I have it, but I'm prepping to compile the latest kernel and use it. Which I have never done before. If anyone can give me a general procedure on this, or link me to a good article on how to compile the linux Kernel, I'd be appreciative.

Check out:
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Rebuilding_OLPC_kernel

[taylr]

Have any of you had any progress? I was just shown puppy last week running on an old 350MHz pentium and was blown away with the performance... seems like a perfect alternative to sugar.