GO TO XO

[First published at The Wayward Word Press as Using SSH to access your XO Laptop on January 2, 2008.]

John Willis just posted the following comment to my post Putting your XO on the Web:

How were you able to ssh out of the box? Root has not password and the default settings for ssh are not to allow root access w/o a password. Also I could not find the documented password for the olpc account. I also found some hits that changing the olpc password might give the X application (sugar) some fits. If you want to read more on my first day expereinces please see…

Hot Chocolate at Starbucks.

I strongly suggest you view his post, for it has a charming picture of his two sons using an XO at a Starbucks. I bet some of their friends who got WII’s are going to turn “green” with envy pretty soon.

As for SSH access, it is important to keep in mind XO Axiom 1, The XO Laptop is a general-purpose Linux computer with builtin network access capabilities.

In particular, since the XO runs Linux, it supports the super-user, “root,” and root has the power to do anything. The default password d for root is nothing, you just press the ENTER key when asked to enter the password. This is a real security issue, and I will address it in a future post. If you are going to take the XO to a place where others might be able to access it, then you should first use “passwd” to set up a password for root.

Once you get in as root you can both change passwords and create new users. So if you don’t know the password for “olpc” then you can use “passwd” to define a new one.

I gained access to my XO using SSH by first creating a new user, “shields” while running the XO. Once I had done that I had no problem using SSH to gain access from my Linux box.