This guide will guide you through the steps of installing Debian GNU/Linux “etch” on an OLPC XO-1, and get it online with functioning apt package system.

From there you can install a windowing system, or upgrade your edition of Debian.

There exists guides on the official OLPC website, but they are outdated and have broken links. This page aims to update the documentation from the official source, until the official document is updated. This page will link to local sources, so as long as this page is up, so are all the required resources for downloads etc.

This documentation assumes that you are running a clean install of OLPC XO-1 software, but should work on a system with at least 300 MB free space on the system disk. If you are having issues with any steps documented before booting into Debian, try reimaging the OLPC XO-1 software with version 8.2.0 (also known as build 767). Follow the instructions here under Offline upgrade to reinstall the operating system. All existing files on the OLPC will be erased!

(original source)

These instructions assume you are starting from build 612 or later, which has support for booting from multiple images. (This started working some time prior to build 612, but I can't be bothered to look up the exact build right now.)

Although more detail is on this page, these other instructions might be more appropriate for newer systems: Debian Jessie on XO

Note that you require a Developer key to run unsigned operating systems.

Now, boot into sugar. You are currently running from the system in /versions/run/build_number, which is a copy-on-write mirror of /versions/pristine/build_number. We're going to install debian in /versions/pristine/debian. (See Early boot for details on the OS versioning scheme.)

• Note that in recent builds, you can magically get to the results of step 3 below by typing: