Rich Burridge's Blog : Weblog

« My Manager The Rock... | Main | OLPC Order Cancelled »

Friday February 01, 2008

OLPC Prototype To Play With

The Accessibility Program Office team has been in two days of meetings. For somebody whose personal philosophy is that the usefulness of a meeting is indirectly proportional to the length of time it takes and the number of people involved, this has been a bit of a struggle.

What helped ease the pain was that we were in the Drawing Room at the Executive Mansion on the Santa Clara campus. This has got to be one of the nicest Sun buildings I've had the pleasure to work in.

We have come away with a list of tasks that we will need to focus on, and a prioritized list.

One of the other good things that happened was that Peter Korn kindly lent me an OLPC prototype that he was given at CSUN last year. The one I had trouble opening. While we are waiting for the Give One Get One! folks to get their act together, Duncan and I can have a play with this. It looks like the battery is completely dead (and I haven't worked out yet how to recharge it -- assuming you can), so we'll have to keep it plugged in for now.

What I also need to work out (apart from learning yet another completely new desktop UI) are two things:

This machine is about a year old, and only has 128Mb. Should I try to upgrade it to the latest build? Will that be able to run in half the amount of memory that "modern" XO laptops now have?
What is the best way to upgrade this? The wiki page talks about going into the virtual terminal: Hold down Alt, Ctrl, and the 'Neighborhood' key -- third key from the left along the top row -- and run olpc-update. Now I admit, this machine, its operating system and desktop environment are all new to me, but as far as I can see, this just doesn't work for me, and I suspect it's a feature that's been added in, in the last year. How do you get to a virtual terminal on a machine that's about a year old, and can I expect to find olpc-update when I get there?
It looks like another way to upgrade this might be to do an Activated Upgrade. I need to read all a lot more before I feel comfortable making a choice.

Any advice on this would be very much appreciated. Until I've determined whether I should do an upgrade, and the best approach, I'm going to keep reading the wiki and we are going to try out the built-in applications using the current build (even though it's positively ancient on the XO laptop timescale).

[Technorati Tag: OLPC]

( Feb 01 2008, 03:41:54 PM PST ) [Listen] Permalink Comments [13]

Comments:

Hi,
You probably have a B2 prototype. I _think_ that people who have them, and upgrade to the latest build, get a _really_ slow system.
Try asking in one of the irc channels, mailing lists or forum, they are all mentioned at http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Support .

Posted by Eduardo H. Silva on February 01, 2008 at 05:22 PM PST #

Oh, and I think the best way to upgrade for you is going with the activated upgrade, because the olpc-update program in that build could be very ancient. Both are good choices, and give you the same end result, with just a (major) difference: olpc-update doesn't touch the home directory, /home/olpc , while activated upgrade erases everything.
Those two pages at the wiki, of ways to install, are really what you needed, good findings :) Read them well, choose the method you want (I would suggest the activated upgrade), read carefully the instructions, and it's quite easy.
I used to do it all the time when I first got the machine, and didn't have enough worthy things to save on it.

Posted by 213.22.209.55 on February 01, 2008 at 05:26 PM PST #

Thanks Eduardo. I've worked out that I've
currently got build 303 on it, and it feels
slow. I'll ask on the mailing lists.

Posted by Rich Burridge on February 01, 2008 at 05:56 PM PST #

Hi Rich, I work at OLPC.

The activated upgrade won't work for you, I'm afraid, because it requires a newer firmware than the old one you have now.

The latest builds will probably run on your B2, but might well hit out-of-memory if you try to run a few activities at once.

The lowest-common-denominator way to upgrade is probably something like:

ok flash usb:\q2d11.rom
ok copy-nand usb:\os690.img

Feel free to leave follow-up questions here, I'll see them via e-mail.

-- cjb.

Posted by Chris on February 02, 2008 at 09:30 PM PST #

Hi Chris,

Thanks for the comment. Well I've got two
immediate questions:

1/ I'm guessing the "ok" is some kind of boot
prompt. How do I get to it?

2/ You mention two files, q2d11.rom and os690.img
that I presume I need to put on a USB stick.
The os690.img is similar to the os653.img
that's mentioned on
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Activated_Upgrade
but I guess it the latest (unstable) developer
image.
Where do I download these two files from?

I also suspect that, if I successfully do
upgrade this OLPC, that, because it's only
got 128Mb of memory, it's going to run *really*
slowly. I sat with Duncan, our nine year old
on Friday night, and he was getting really
frustrated with how long everything was
currently taking. This was a combination of the
lack of memory, and being right on the edge of
the wireless network. I suspect he's going to
get even more frustrated with the very latest
(in other words, there was a very good reason
why the design was changed to 256Mb).

Maybe it's better to leave thing be, and wait for
the "real thing" to come in the February/March
timeframe...

Posted by Rich Burridge on February 03, 2008 at 03:58 AM PST #

I've found the firmware file:
http://dev.laptop.org/pub/firmware/q2d11/q2d11.rom

And I can alway use the last stable build:
http://download.laptop.org/xo-1/os/official/656/jffs2/os656.img

So I guess my modified questions now become:

1/ How do I get to the "ok" prompt?
2/ Should I use os690.img instead, and if so where
do I get it from?

Thanks.

Posted by Rich Burridge on February 03, 2008 at 09:25 AM PST #

I see I'm answering a lot of my own questions: 8-)
Instructions for fireware at:

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OLPC_Firmware_q2d11

I'll give it a go now...

Posted by Rich Burridge on February 03, 2008 at 09:28 AM PST #

Hi Rich,

656 is fine. To get to the ok prompt (which is the same prompt as in the Sparc BIOS -- the original author of Open Firmware works for OLPC now) you hit escape at the "Press escape to interrupt startup.." line that you should see immediately at boot.

The firmware can reflash the NAND via USB/wireless/SD, so it's a great backup mechanism; no matter what you do to the NAND, we can always reflash from there.

-- cjb.

Posted by Chris on February 03, 2008 at 09:29 AM PST #

I think the firmware has been updated. I used the
commands from the OLPC Firmware webpage:

On my Ubuntu machine:
Plugged in a new 1GB USB stick.
From a terminal window:

% cd /media/USB\ DISK/
% mkdir boot
% cd boot
% cp ~/Desktop/q2d11.rom .

On the OLPC:
Plugged in the USB stick
Powered it on and kept hitting the Esc key.
At one point it probes the USB devices.
A couple more Esc presses and I get to an "ok"
prompt.

ok flash u:\boot\q2d11.rom

It reads, writes and verifies, then appears to
turn the machine off.

What I have noticed now is the battery shaped
light is on (and orange). This indicator wasn't
on before. I'm going to leave it plugged in and
see whether the battery will get recharged.

I'm also now going to put the os656.img file on
the USB stick and see if:

ok copy-nand u:\os690.img

works.