What I did this afternoon (or: Windows XP on OLPC XO-1)

18 October 2008

This is possibly one of the most cruel things one could do to an OLPC XO-1:

Windows XP being shown on OLPC XO-1 screen.

That’s Windows XP under QEMU under Gentoo on an OLPC XO-1.

It took about two hours to run the mini-setup routine from a previously sysprepped image I had created, and took about 10 minutes to boot. The user interface is virtually unusable, and the VM can only be practically run with 128MB of RAM allocated to it.

I installed Gentoo during yesterday and the day before from a stage3 tarball. I wish I’d found out about GentooXO sooner. Also, I’m running QEMU with the kqemu accelerator installed.

It would be interesting to get Windows XP working natively, but I doubt that will ever happen (apart from Microsoft’s own efforts). I doubt you can kexec() into a Windows kernel, and you would need to initialise the display adapter to the exact right mode (the XO-1 appears to only support one video mode), which Windows would almost certainly not support out of the box.

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Slipstreaming Windows XP with Service Pack 3 in Linux

12 July 2008

In between constructing table-based layouts in Dreamweaver (groan) in a web design class, I slipstreamed Service Pack 3 into Windows XP using only tools available in Linux. I didn’t boot into Windows once during the process (except for, obviously, booting the resulting ISO image in a VM to make sure it worked), but I did use Wine at one point.

This post isn’t going to be a how-to; rather, I will just give you a quick overview of how I did it, and let you readers fill in the gaps.

Here are the tools I used:

What I did:

  • Extracted the contents of a Windows XP ISO (in your case, it may be the CD) into a directory called “xp” on my Desktop. I initially loop-mounted the ISO and copied the files out of it that way, but I later had to re-extract them with file-roller instead. The reason? If you extract the contents of the ISO with lower-case names (the loop-mounted ISO lower-cased all the filenames), the CD will not boot. Make sure they are all in uppercase.
  • Extracted Service Pack 3: mkdir ~/Desktop/sp3 && cd ~/Desktop/sp3 && cabextract ../xpsp3.exe
  • Ran the slipstreamer for SP3 on the files: cd ~/sp3/update && wine update.exe /integrate:Z:\\home\\jeremy\\Desktop\\xp
  • Extracted the boot image from the existing Windows XP ISO. (To do this, you can either use the geteltorito command, run BBIE under Wine, or follow the directions under the “Finding the CD boot image” heading on this guide.)
  • Made the ISO image with genisoimage. You’ll at least need the -b (reference the boot image you extracted in the previous step), -no-emul-boot, -c, -max-iso9660-filenames, -relaxed-filenames options.

If you’re lucky, you now have a Windows XP SP3 ISO.

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