Talk:Upgrading to LinuxBIOS

Is it right that this effectively "dongles" the OLPC hardware to the OLPC version of Fedora, making it impossible to use another Linux distribution or another operating system?

You could use another Linux distribution if you wanted to, but you would need a special file called /olpc-boot.sh that will kexec your kernel. You will need two (or three) things: your bzImage file, a command line, and an optional initrd. Here's a basic and plain olpc-boot.sh script:

#!/bin/sh
kbl-kexec ./boot/bzImage "root=/dev/sda1 console=ttyS0,115200 console=tty0 rootdelay=10 rw" ./boot/initrd

Other operating systems won't work because we omitted everything but the bzImage loader in kbl-kexec to save space. - JordanCrouse (Talk to me!) 21:22, 29 August 2006 (EDT)

Also, can you please elaborate on: "This only works if you haven't powered off or otherwise reset the OLPC board since you loaded LinuxBIOS into FLASH. The reason is because LinuxBIOS cannot boot the software that we use in this procedure, which is set up to be booted by Insyde BIOS."

The software used in the process doesn't have an olpc-boot.sh file.-JordanCrouse (Talk to me!) 21:22, 29 August 2006 (EDT)

Will it be possible to restore the Insyde BIOS at a later time?

Yes - JordanCrouse (Talk to me!) 21:22, 29 August 2006 (EDT)

Any news yet on restoring the Insyde BIOS after the fact? What tools and procedures are needed? 6 October 2006