Upgrading firmware

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  For the general public

XO-1.5 Instructions

See the latest 1.5 instructions at Firmware.

XO-1 Instructions

Overview of firmware upgrades

2007 Give One, Get One donors and other users: You can upgrade to a newer stable release, which includes an upgrade to the XO's firmware along with new system software. The latest stable release is 13.2.11 || 2020-01-29.

If you need to upgrade only your firmware, refer to the following instructions to upgrade to new signed (official release) versions of the firmware. These are distributed as .zip files.

Unofficial development versions of firmware are distributed as .rom files. You need to get a developer key to upgrade to these and you follow a different upgrade process. Refer to Manual Firmware Install for more details.

Steps to upgrade firmware

ALL steps must be followed exactly.

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

   If you lose power during a firmware upgrade you might brick the laptop, which prevents it from working at all.

Using a USB flash drive and another computer

1. Locate the zip file of the firmware image that you want to flash onto the laptop. You can do this by browsing the directory listing at http://dev.laptop.org/pub/firmware. After selecting the version of the firmware that you want to upgrade to, the zip file you want is called bootfw.zip
   • For example, for Q2E41 you would want http://dev.laptop.org/pub/firmware/q2e41/bootfw.zip
   • (for some versions there is no bootfw.zip file, choose a version that has one, or obtain the corresponding file from a signed operating system build)
2. Right click the link to the bootfw.zip file and select the "Save as" option
3. Create a folder called "boot" on the USB drive
4. Copy the above .zip to the USB drive (do NOT unzip the file)
5. Remove the USB drive
6. Power off the XO, and ensure it is plugged in
7. Insert the USB drive into the XO
8. Power on the XO
9. It should indicate that it is rewriting the firmware
10. Wait for the XO to reboot automatically
11. Remove the USB drive

Using only your XO

1. Open the Terminal activity or a console
2. Type the following (press the Enter key after each line):

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

3. 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 its current version is earlier than what is in bootfw.zip