Clementson's Blog

Lisp on the OLPC XO Laptop

Friday, January 11, 2008

With all the speculation over the OLPC XO as the next Lisp machine (see here, here, here), I was wondering who would be the first person to actually get a Lisp installed on the OLPC XO Laptop. Well, looks like the honour goes to Grant Rettke - he's created a build of DrScheme (a Scheme implementation that in the past I dubbed "the best Open Source Lisp") for the OLPC XO laptop. It's implemented as a binary rather than an XO "activity"; however, it appears very usable (Grant says that converting it to an activity is going to take a bit more work).



Grant provides a tarball that you can download as well as a build script so that you can build DrScheme for the XO yourself. There's also a flickr set of pictures of DrScheme on the XO so that (if you're a Canadian donor and haven't received your XO yet) you can still drool over a Lisp on the XO in pictures!

Good job Grant!

Update-2008-01-11: I also got an email from Greg Pfeil saying that he had been able to install SBCL on the XO. It was as simple as:

sudo yum install sbcl

sudo yum install emacs

 As root:
   yum install gcc
   yum install glibc-headers
   yum install make

 As user olpc (the user account on the machine):
   curl -O http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~gambit/download/gambit/v4.1/source/gambc-v4_1_2.tgz
   tar xvzf gambc-v4_1_2.tgz
   cd gambc-v4_1_2
   ./configure --prefix=/home/olpc/local/Gambit-C
   make
   make install

"It really is that simple. This gets you a working Gambit binary that will run from inside the Terminal activity. It's not yet its own activity, and so will not run from the Sugar user interface; I think it's a noble goal to rectify that situation. The Gambit compiler is not terribly useful, of course, without a C compiler, which the stock XO lacks, which presents problems of its own when bundling Gambit as an activity."