First Footage: Same OLPC XO Boots Both Sugar and Windows XP

via Gizmodo US


This is the first footage of the same XO OLPC doing a dual-boot of Sugar Linux and Windows XP—something skeptics have said wasn't going to happen. Soon, XOs will ship with both Sugar and XP for Boot Camp-style dual-booting options. They will never come with only XP, though the team is working on adding more of the Sugar functionality, like the mesh network and the fun sharing apps, to the Windows side. Once again, little PCs are coming to the rescue of Windows XP.

To get both operating systems to run, the BIOS has been modified to behave more like standard PCs (rather than Macs or Linux machines). The original BIOS for the XO was originally conceived for AIX and Solaris servers, all running variants of UNIX.

In Windows, the screen flipper and directional pad both work fine, and I'm told by Michail Bletsas, OLPC's connectivity guru, that the camera is also not a problem, as the drivers were available for XP even before they were available for Linux.

You'll note that even sped up 3X what it actually took, Windows still seems a little slow to boot. Michail says it takes a little over a minute for Windows to boot on the XO with 2GB of onboard memory. 2GB of space is needed for Windows XP, though one gets the impression it would do a lot better with 4GB. The machines still have only 256MB of RAM.

And in case you're wondering what that red OLPC is doing in the background, we explained that last Friday.


Video clip here