14 DAY TRIAL // For those of you who didn't hear about it, the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) is an interesting campaign started some time ago that is meant to bring a laptop to every child from every corner of the world. Of course, the entire campaign is made with educational purposes so the operating system installed on the laptop bundles only special application. But what if you're able to install this operating system on your computer and use it just like on any other laptop donated by the organization? Well, you could do it following some simple steps and a virtual machine to configure the operating system.
First of all, you should know that the operating system installed on the OLPCs is actually a Fedora Core-based Linux distribution so don't expect to run too many games on it. The folks from UNEASYsilence discovered a special image of the operating system that allows you to install the operating system using VMWare or Parallels for Mac. If you want to download the OLPC operating system image you can take it straight from Redhat using this link.
So, the first step is to create a new virtual machine using Parallels. Choose Linux as the operating system and check the Other Linux button. Set the amount of ram and the hard disk image size to 512, check the Plain option and hit the next button. Leave the other settings just the way you find them, name your virtual machine as you want and press the finish button.
After finishing the configuration steps, your new virtual machine will fail to boot as there is no operating system installed. The next thing you should do is to extract the image file included in the RedHat download and move it to /Users/YOURUSERNAME/Documents/Parallels/OLPC/. Rename it to otherlin.hdd AFTER you deleted the original file from the Parallels folder. All you need to do now is launch Parallels and boot from the virtual machine.