Run the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) OS on Your Computer
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UPDATE: All download links have been updated.
Has the OLPC project and the “Sugar” OS piqued your interest with all the press coverage it has received? Thankfully since the whole project was created with an open source mission, users can easily download the OLPC OS (Which is a fork of Red Hat) and run on any hardware they see fit.
If you run VMWare (Player for PC or Fusion for Mac) we made it easy by making available a pre-configured VMWare image of the OLPC OS that is already customized (and has networking enabled) that you can download here. To use the VMWare image just open the configuration file in VMWare.
If you are a Parallels user you can also run the OLPC “Sugar” UI in but it will have significantly more steps, because there is no pre-configured image. You must download the OLPC OS from Red Hats servers (Which is available here) and configure it in Parallels.
In Parallels:
- File Menu, choose New
- Click Custom, then Next button
- OS Type: Linux, OS version: Other Linux, then next button
- Set ram to 512, Next Button
- Leave “Create a new hard disk image” selected, click Next button
- Specify 512 for hard disk image size, select “Plain” and then click Next button
- Leave Shared Networking checked and click Next button
- Name this VM “OLPC” and click Next button
- Click Finish
What will happen after you hit finish your OLPC VM will launch, but obviously fail to boot. Ignore that error and stop the VM environment and quit Parallels.
- Now extract the IMG file from the “olpc-redhat-stream-development-build-529-20070722_0329-devel_ext3.img.bz2″ that you downloaded earlier and copy that IMG to /Users/YOURUSERNAME/Documents/Parallels/OLPC/
- Delete otherlin.hdd in your Parallels folder, and rename the just copied IMG file (You know, the one with the really long name) to otherlin.hdd
- Launch Parallels. When OLPC opens, click the green Play button to launch OLPC
