Dextrose

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The deployments' XO Operating System

Dextrose is a Sugar distribution for XO laptops jointly developed by Activity Central, Paraguay Educa, Plan Ceibal in collaboration with OLPC and the Sugar community.

Our focus is stability and usability in the classroom, but we've also merged some new features contributed by deployments and freelance contributors.

New features in Dextrose2

Backport of Sugar 0.88 (Bernie Innocenti)
Journal sorting options (Andrés Ambrois)
Intuitive resource monitoring (Anish Mangal)
Journal Backup/restore to removable devices (Martin Abente, Esteban Arias)
Journal Backup/restore to schoolserver (Martin Abente)
Protected activities support ( Martin Abente)
Improved GSM/3G handling (Daniel Castelo, Martin Abente)
Tabbed browsing (Anish Mangal)
Virtual keyboard (Esteban Arias)
Accessibility features (Esteban Arias)
Journal repair functionality (Esteban Arias)
Fast switching between touchpad and pen-tablet modes (Walter Bender)
OLPC Microformat support in activity updater (Akash Gangil, Anish Mangal)
Ad-hoc Networks (Simon Schampijer)
Ability to reissue registration to schoolserver (Martin Abente)
freeworld codecs for most multimedia formats, including MP3 music and H264 videos (Bernie Innocenti)
Extensive field testing (Bernie Innocenti)
Lease information display in Control Panel->About My Computer()
Automatic crashlog reporting and manual feedback reporting, with server side daemon (Aleksey Lim, Martin Abente, Mukesh Gupta)
Notification system (Martin Abente)
Automatic yum based updater (Martin Abente, Aleksey Lim, Anish Mangal)
Nearly complete Spanish Translations (Martin Abente, Sebastian Codas:scs, Carlos Garay:car|0s)
One Click Share 3G (Martin Abente)

Dextrose 2 - World Edition

This is a release build targeted for use by multiple deployments worldwide. We do appreciate feedback and bug reports.

Hardware	OS Images	Size	Date
XO-1, without GNOME	os508dx.img os508dx.crc	411MB	Apr 1 2011
XO-1.5, without GNOME	os508dx.zd	339MB	Apr 1 2011

GNOME builds are currently unsupported. If you require GNOME for evaluation purposes in your deployment, please ask on the Dextrose mailing-list. For more details on this release, see the Dextrose 2 pages: Change Log, Todo List.

Development releases | Older releases

Knowing your way around the new features

Installation

XO-1

First, ensure that your laptop is unlocked.
Download both osXXXXX.img and osXXXXX.crc to the root directory of a USB stick or SD card.
Drop to the "ok" prompt by pressing (Esc) repeatedly during boot
Type the command: copy-nand u:\osNdx.img for a USB stick or copy-nand sd:\osNdx.img for a SD card followed by (enter)
Wait for the display to fill in with color and the "ok" prompt to return
Type the command reboot followed by (enter)
The XO will reboot, finish writing, reboot itself, and take you to the naming and color choice process
During the reboots, keep the charger connected to allow OFW to self-update