Running OLPC within VMWare Player

Those of you running on Windows, or those for whom QEMU is too slow, might like to try out running the OLPC firmware images within VMWare Player. There’s two steps required to try this out, converting the disk image to VMWare format, and creating a machine configuration file. To convert the disk image, the QEMU disk management tool ‘qemu-img’ is used:

# qemu-img convert olpc.img -O vmdk olpc.vmdk

Now, the next step is to create a configuration file describing the type of machine we need. The core bits are, an IDE harddrive pointing to the olpc.vmdk image, a network device, 128 MB of ram, and optionally a sound card, and USB support. There are online tools to create a suitable config, or just take this example I created earlier:

config.version = "8"
virtualHW.version = "3"

MemAllowAutoScaleDown = "FALSE"
MemTrimRate = "-1"

uuid.location = "56 4d 4a 49 37 3e de 3c-a8 71 14 0f b4 e4 ce cc"
uuid.bios = "56 4d 4a 49 37 3e de 3c-a8 71 14 0f b4 e4 ce cc"

uuid.action = "create"
checkpoint.vmState = ""

displayName = "OLPC Fedora Linux"
guestOS = "other26xlinux"
memsize = "128"

ethernet0.present = "TRUE"
ethernet0.connectionType = "nat"
ethernet0.addressType = "generated"
ethernet0.generatedAddress = "00:0c:29:e4:ce:cc"
ethernet0.generatedAddressOffset = "0"

usb.present = "TRUE"
usb.generic.autoconnect = "FALSE"

sound.present = "TRUE"
sound.virtualdev = "es1371"

scsi0.present = "FALSE"

floppy0.present = "FALSE"

ide0:0.present = "TRUE"
ide0:0.fileName = "olpc.vmdk"
ide0:0.deviceType = "disk"
ide0:0.mode = "persistent"
ide0:0.redo = ""
ide0:0.writeThrough = "TRUE"
ide0:0.startConnected = "TRUE"

ide0:1.present = "FALSE"
ide1:0.present = "FALSE"
ide1:1.present = "FALSE"

With the initial disk image released a couple of weeks ago, the X server won’t work, but the next image will include the display driver for VMWare. Anyway, save the above configuration file (or an equivalent) as olpc.vmx and then run vmplayer olpc.vmx to get started