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.

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.

Using a USB flash drive and another computer

1. Right click and select "save as" on the following link:

   http://dev.laptop.org/pub/firmware/q2d14/bootfw.zip

2. Create a folder called "boot" on the flash drive
3. Copy the above .zip to the flash drive (do NOT unzip the file)
4. Remove the flash drive
5. Power off the laptop, and ensure it is plugged in
6. Insert the flash drive
7. Power on the laptop
8. It should indicate that it is rewriting the firmware

Using only your XO

1. Open the Terminal activity
2. 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

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