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Introduction

This page tells you how to turn an ordinary SDHC card into a Balsa jaunty SD card for the OLPC. It uses a Linux computer. The steps are:

  • Install the programs you will need.
  • Download the information (image file) for the Balsa SD card.
  • Extract the image (IMG) file.
  • Copy it to an SD card.

NOTE:

This process writes over the SD card completely. Any existing data on the card will be lost.

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Install the Programs That You Need

Install the following packages:

  • p7zip
  • zsync
  • usb-imagewriter

You can do that using Synaptic, Ubuntu Software Center, or the following Terminal command:

sudo apt-get install p7zip zsync usb-imagewriter

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Downloading the Image Using Zsync

Start a Terminal session. Change directory to where you want to download the image file. Enter a command to download the image.

For a 4 GB image:

zsync http://downloads.sil.org/legacy/balsa/balsa-0.6-jaunty-alpha-1-4gb.img.7z.zsync

For an 8 GB image:

zsync http://downloads.sil.org/legacy/balsa/balsa-0.6-jaunty-alpha-1-8gb.img.7z.zsync

A message may appear in Terminal: “No relevant local data found…” If you are not trying to resume an interrupted zsync download, ignore this message and let the download continue. If you DO want to resume an interrupted zsync download of this file and you see this message, type CTRL+C, check to be sure the current directory is where your interrupted download lives, then repeat the zsync command.

The image is a large file and may take some time. If you have to interrupt it, you can continue on from where it left off by re-entering the zsync command above.

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Extracting the Image

In a Terminal session, change directory to where you downloaded the image file.

For a 4 GB image, type:

7zr e balsa-0.6-jaunty-alpha-1-4gb.img.7z

For an 8 GB image, type:

7zr e balsa-0.6-jaunty-alpha-1-8gb.img.7z

This will create a file named balsa-0.6-jaunty-alpha-1-4gb.img or balsa-0.6-jaunty-alpha-1-8gb.img in that directory.

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Copying the Image to the SD Card

Run the Imagewriter (Applications | Accessories | Imagewriter if you running the Gnome Interface; Search for Imagewriter if you’re running Unity). Select the image file and the SD card.

An alternate way is to do the following instead:

  1. Find the device name of the SD card. The easiest way to do that is to plug in the SD card, and run the Disk Utility (System | Administration | Disk Utility). The device name is titled Device: and looks something like /dev/sdd or /dev/mmcblk0.
  2. Open a Terminal window and change to the directory where you have the file named balsa-0.6-jaunty-alpha-1-4gb.img or balsa-0.6-jaunty-alpha-1-8gb.img.
  3. In the following line, replace sd-card with the /dev/sdd or /dev/mmcblk0 you found in step 1.

For a 4 GB image, type:

sudo dd bs=4M if=balsa-0.6-jaunty-alpha-1-4gb.img of=sd-card

For an 8 GB image, type:

sudo dd bs=4M if=balsa-0.6-jaunty-alpha-1-4gb.img of=sd-card

When the program or command is finished, the SD card will be a Balsa SD card.

You can use the card to set up a machine to run Balsa, either the machine you just used to produce the card or a different machine.

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