I realized that OLPC is releasing their
software platform for download. They offer a LiveCD and Qemu images. Since I
am using VMWare -- only because that is what I am familiar with -- I thought I
would download the LiveCD and step through an installation. (I have been
installing and re-installing
OpenSolaris this same way for the past
couple days) However, I found that the LiveCD is not an installation CD -- or
if it is, does not work like the LiveCDs I am use to. Thus, I thought I would
install Qemu and try the
OLPC/Sugar Qemu image.
Impressions of Qemu
I thought Qemu was easy to install and easy to use. I think it could use a
front-end -- mostly because I have a bunch of images and I want to go to one
location to start any of them up. I still am not sure if Qemu has any issues
with networking or not. The OLPC/Sugar image did not start the network
connection on start, but if I ran dhclient, I got eth0 up. BUT, when I tried a
fresh install of OpenSolaris, the install complained that there was no network
link. Qemu (with
Kqemu) seemed
to run as fast as (or faster) than VMware. I also like that it is OSS.
Impressions of Sugar
I like the interface a lot. I thought there are still a lot of issues to get worked out. However, I enjoyed mucking around with the interface. I, also, like that everything is build on Linux. Thus, if I had an issue, I could switch over to the console and debug away. See Sugar Instructions for a brief explanation of how Sugar works. I hope to post my own screenshots soon.