OLPC in QEMU under Linux

The OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) people have made available a VMWare image to show off their software.

I don’t run VMWare, but I do use QEMU which can open VMWare disk images. Here’s what I did to make it work.

Get the zipped image:-

$ wget http://www.alexanderweb.de/mirror/olpc-182.zip

Unpack it:-

$ unzip olpc-182.zip

I already have QEMU installed, but if you didn’t then you might want to this blog post that details kvm (and QEMU) or this one which has some info about QEMU in it.

Start QEMU:-

$ qemu -hda OLPC/olpc-build182.vmdk 

I took some screenshots, but as I am at work I had to set up an ssh tunnel to home and use the “-vnc” option for qemu to expose the desktop over vnc. I then VNCed into home (directly to the QEMU session) and took some screenshots.

(the reason I explained that is because I am sure someone will pick up on me having run the windows version of VNC – rest assured QEMU is running under Linux – but of course it *could* run under Windows

GRUB! Note it mentions QEMU and not VMWare

The main screen you see once booted:-

The menu/launcher that appears around the screen when the mouse gets to the edge:-

Oops. Not sure what happened here.

The chat client.

Closing apps is done with the icons along the top of the screen:-

I never was any good at snap – ask Sophie:-

Looks good. Might have to knock up a screencast later