Upgrading firmware

  For the general public

Steps of Upgrading Firmware

G1G1 donors: You can also just wait for Update.1. Update.1 will include a system firmware upgrade.

The following instructions are specifically for upgrades to new signed (official release) versions of the firmware distributed as .zip files. Development versions are provided as unsigned .rom files and need a developer key and a different upgrade process, as do firmware downgrades. Please refer to Manual_Firmware_Install for more details about the alternate methods.

ALL steps must be followed exactly, failure to do so will cause your XO to become UNUSABLE!

1. Make sure your battery is charged.
2. Plug up the XO on external power.

   If you lose power during a firmware upgrade you will brick the laptop.

3. Open the Terminal activity
4. Type the following (press the Enter key after each line):

wget http://dev.laptop.org/pub/firmware/q2d14/bootfw.zip
su -
cp /home/olpc/bootfw.zip /versions/boot/current/boot/
reboot

• Step 4 can also come from a USB key if you don't have networking available. Plug in the USB key and locate bootfw.zip (should be under /media/name_of_usb_key, where name_of_usb_key is the name of your usb key when you formatted it -- a PC or Mac will display the name once the usb key is plugged in). Then type the following (press the Enter key after each line):

su -
cp /media/name_of_usb_key/bootfw.zip /versions/boot/current/boot/
reboot

1. The laptop will then reboot twice more on its own. (Once to enable writing to the flash and then a 2nd time after its done updating.)

The XO will only upgrade the system firmware if it finds that the current version is earlier than whats in bootfw.zip