Upgrading firmware
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This page is monitored by the OLPC team.
For the general public
Overview of firmware upgrades
G1G1 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.
- Make sure your battery is charged.
- Plug the XO into external power.
- If you lose power during a firmware upgrade you will brick the laptop.
Using a USB flash drive and another computer
- Right click and select "save as" on the following link:
- Create a folder called "boot" on the flash drive
- Copy the above .zip to the flash drive (do NOT unzip the file)
- Remove the flash drive
- Power off the XO, and ensure it is plugged in
- Insert the flash drive
- Power on the XO
- It should indicate that it is rewriting the firmware
Using only your XO
- Open the Terminal activity
or a console - 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
- 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