Hacking the OLPC XO Laptop - Part 3: Ubuntu
Monday, February 4, 2008
The other day, I wrote about how I setup the Xfce desktop as an alternative desktop environment on the XO. The base Linux OS on the XO is a customized version of Fedora Linux. I decided to install Ubuntu Linux on a USB stick as an alternative boot OS for my XO. Actually, I installed Xubuntu since the lightweight Xfce desktop is a much better alternative for a small Linux box like the XO than is GNOME (which is the default desktop for Ubuntu). Fortunately, a number of others have already gone through this process already, so I didn't have to figure out the installation problems myself. Unfortunately though, there are a lot of different web pages that detail how different people did the install (see here, here, here, here for some examples). After tediously reading through all of the material that I could find, I settled on the following:
- I used the "compressed files" approach detailed by "moocapiean" (there is a comparison of the "compressed files" and the "disk image" approaches here). The annotated explanation of the steps is here. I found the annotated compressed files explanation much easier to follow than the standard compressed files version as I had a better idea of what was going on - hence a higher "comfort level". ;-)
- I added an "xauth" statement to the Xauthority file (as detailed in comment#3 here so that I could do sysadmin stuff (like download packages).
- There is no step 3! Actually, there are a bunch of things that one would probably do to "tweak" the Xubuntu install; however, the above 2 steps will get you running relatively quickly.
