Prlwytzkofsky

Windows XP on the XO

Posted on 01. May, 2009 by Prlwytzkofsky in Robot

Well, not quite. The pictured green, cute laptop is in fact an OLPC running Debian, remotely connected to a windows XP machine. Great outdoors in spring & summer thanks to the XO’s sunlight readable display. Though forgoing MSWin altogether and sticking to Debian might not be a bad idea either.

It did save my OLPC XO from gathering dust. Installing Debian on the XO is very simple, thanks to the work of Andres Salomon (Dilinger). He has created several preconfigured DebXO images that can be  installed on the OLPC’s internal flash memory or, as I have done, on an external SD or USB device. In the latter case, all you need to do is choose a desktop version to your liking (gnome, kde, lxde, sugar, or awesome), download it, and run the correct Zcat command. Plug-in your USB stick, boot your XO, and before you know it, your XO has transformed into a fully-fledged Debian machine.

That means it takes only a few commands to install RDP software, in case you’d want to remotely connect to a Microsoft Windows client. Just open a console and type:

sudo apt-get install rdesktop gnome-rdp

Resulting in a Gnome-RDP entry in the Applications/Internet menu. Choose the entry, add a session, enter the relevant information of the Windows machine you want to connect to and click the connect button. If all goes well, you should now be able to work, remarkably snappy, remotely on any Windows server that has RDP access enabled.

Oh, if you choose “Fullscreen” for Remote Desktop Size, you can return to your Debian desktop by Crtl+Alt+Enter.

When you want to play music from the remote computer on your XO  you do have one more thing to do. The default RDesktop distribution that you just installed tries to connect to the legacy /dev/dsp device. Since DebXO uses ALSA drivers, you need to load an emulation layer, like the snd_pcm_oss module. This is a module that inserts an OSS “layer”. To make it work at every reboot, open a console and paste:

nano /etc/rc.local

adding

modprobe snd_pcm_oss

at the top. Writeout, close and type,

sudo shutdown -r now

rebooting your XO, and stream away.

A lot of information on DebXO can be found at http://www.olpcnews.com/forum/index.php?topic=3962.0

Tags: desktop, microsoft, mp3, olpc, RDP, remote, streaming, vista, windows, xo, xp