OLPC Dual Booting


Gizmodo has the first ever footage of an OLPC dual-booting both its default OS, Sugar Linux, and Windows XP. The BIOS was not originally intended to boot XP, so it had to be modified for this to work. The XO’s screen flipper and directional buttons work in XP as well.

It’s not all good news, though: XOs are designed to be ultra-lean, packing a meager 256MB of RAM, which is hardly ideal to run XP. Booting it alone took an eternity, so we can’t imagine anyone doing anything practical with this. The machines will never ship with only XP installed.

11 thoughts on “OLPC Dual Booting

  1. Anytime I see an olpc and the mention of sugar, I think of System of a Down.

    I play Russian roulette everyday, a man’s sport,
    with the bullet called life, yeah mama called life (sugar).

    Don’t ask me why.

  2. XOs look nifty, but they lack the horsepower for most power users. the AMD geode in there doesn’t quite cut it IMHO, even running lightweight GUIs like XFCE.

  3. no offense miked_hater, but how is your spamming any different than miked’s? If you have some qualm with his actions, by all means, elaborate, but counter trolling is still trolling in itself.

  4. Not sure I would agree with you wolf — maybe the site admin is trying to decide whether to ban Miked or not, and seeing dozens of “we hate miked” comments would sway him towards booting the little dickwad. I know which way I’d cast my vote…

    On the same topic, why aren’t we seeing the “full” Weblogs Inc comment system as used on Engadget etc? I have to do confirmation emails for every comment, plus we can’t “report” comments like the ones we’re talking about in an automated fashion.

  5. l approve of this post.

    gh0stly:

    Agree, if win2k boots it will be plenty quick.

    Isn’t the real speed problem the embedded Geode and speed of the secondary storage? Not the ram. l could be wrong.

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