OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) project had launched G1G1: people buy 2 OLPC and get 1 Linux laptop. The other Linux laptop is given to a child in developing countries.

See their website at xogiving dot org.

If I buy this OLPC laptop for outdoor/emergency use, is it possible to customize the Linux OS on this laptop?

1. Disabling Internal Flash drive and use external USB hard disk, external USB CD-ROM drive.

2. Removing all eye candy / education applications, install TWM / IceWM / lightweight windows manager.

3. Boot to console mode, not X Windows (X.org), and use svgalib/Frame buffer.

Is the above customization possible?
Thank you.

You might want to ask the OLPC people - nobody here has one of those devices.

I don't have a OLPC laptop as well. However, I do like to share my experience with USB hard disk.

I have a system load the entire OS from USB disk (200GB SATA disk with SATA-USB converter). The performance is not that great and it crashed after a period (few hours) of operation (even when I put in a dedicated power source). The disk still work and able to recover after reboot. However, from my experience, I have great reservation on the reliability of the USB hard disk. I don't think I will trust it as emergency system.

The reason I am pounding on 'nobody actually has one' is that there are often some gotchas with those kind of devices - looked into miniboxes once and what they don't tell you there is that it is almost impossible to change anything OS in some devices w/o going thru a lot of hoops.

From what I read they were about to implement some security scheme that keeps people from installing unauthorized software on those things (OLPC).

The official reply from OLPC software development team:

XO laptops do not have standard/ordinary BIOS as other AMD Geode Laptops. Off the shelf / unmodified Linux Distro cannot run on XO. Linux can run on XO laptops with modified / patched kernel. There is no support for BSD, Haiku, AROS or other open source operating system.

IMO they should give warnings about this BIOS problems before selling the XO laptops to general public. Perhaps in the future they sell XO laptops with standard BIOS (AMI, Phoenix/Award etc) to general public.

So what you get is a crippled box and to make up for it you got to pay for two - cool.

Got nothing against helping people but it comes to a point where things get ridiculous.

Why is this a problem? Many if not most embedded devices are not generic mini x86 motherboards which makes a standard linux distribution not compatable regardless of CPU. For example Cell phones, PDAs and and even IPODs all run linux with a modified kernel. IMHO this is not a problem. The XO is a specialized embedded device and not really a laptop pe se. And besides the developers did not say linux could not run on an XO.

> Cannot run on OLPC

I mean ordinary/off-the-shelf/unmodified Linux CANNOT run on XO device. They market the product as AMD Geode laptops (see their domain laptop.org). Some buyer may think they sell ordinary x86 laptops with ordinary BIOS.

Another fact from developers: There is no video hardware that support VGA/EGA/CGA video mode on XO device. The program written for VGA/EGA/CGA will not run on XO, unless the user use "VGA emulator / VGA emulation". Most modern PC laptops still support applications for VGA video mode (640x480 16 colors) without any emulation.