About a year ago now, I participated in the “Give One, Get One” program for the One Laptop Per Child foundation. As part of that, I got one of the little XO laptops. They’re neat little machines, 433MHz processors with 256MB RAM - not a lot of computing power, but fun to play with.

I messed around with the Sugar OS for a while, but admittedly got a little tired of it since there’s not a lot you can do in it - it’s an educational item, after all, not a little netbook or something. To that effect, it sat dormant in my office for a few months… until now.

I got the urge to get an alternate OS working on there so I could use Firefox and browse the web - actually use it like a mini notebook for light tasks. I found some instructions on the OLPC wiki that explain how to get Ubuntu installed on the XO, but after trying several times, it just wasn’t working for me. I couldn’t get past the step where you set up the Ubuntu image using QEMU. The image would always boot poorly or, in some cases, not at all… and, frankly, while I used to be a Linux guy, my skills in that arena are a bit too rusty to adequately troubleshoot those issues. Plus, the way they explain it, you’re actually putting Ubuntu right on the system - no going back to the original Sugar OS.

Thankfully, I found another set of instructions - how to install Ubuntu on an SD card and boot the XO from that. While the setup takes some time, it was super simple and worked like a charm. Plus, it’s non-destructive: if you mess anything up, you can always just remove the SD card and you’re back to Sugar OS.

I have my XO booting Ubuntu now and it’s in the process of running system updates. I’m excited to put it back to use! If you have an XO and are interested in getting it running more interesting applications than what’s available on Sugar, try booting Ubuntu from an SD card. It’s worth it.

UPDATES!

I’m going to post updates to this entry as I get experience with the XO using Ubuntu and include additional things you may want to do, or gotchas you might run into.

• Make sure to read the comments on that blog article that explains the SD card installation of Ubuntu. There are some things in there that you’ll need to know or might help you out.
• Check out this wiki entry about customizing Ubuntu on XO. It has a lot of things you might want to do to this base install.
• Change your hostname. The default hostname for the installation is “OLPC” - a little generic, and if you have more than one at home, problematic. In order to do this, edit your /etc/hostname file to have your new hostname. Also, edit the /etc/hosts file, find the line in there for “OLPC,” and replace “OLPC” with your new hostname. Yes, you have to do it in both places. Reboot and you’re good.
• Some settings you change won’t persist across reboots. I think this boils down to my not understanding where various settings get updated. For example, the touch pad speed was super slow for me and no matter how many times I changed the setting in the control panel, it wouldn’t persist the setting. Turns out there’s a .xfce4_startup file in the OLPC user’s home directory that specifies the mouse speed - and it overrides any setting you may have put in the control panel. You can change the mouse setting by modifying the xset m 6/10 15 line to be something more appropriate. According to the wiki entry, this will differ based on your firmware verson. For me, xset m 5 12 seems to work really well. I assume you could just remove the line and have it fall back to use the settings from the control panel… but I didn’t try it.