Notes on booting Quirky on OLPC

Continuation from previous blog post, about the single-file Quirky:

http://bkhome.org/archive/blog2/201001/test-single-file-quirky.html

My OLPC laptop doesn't work. It has been sitting in its original box, with original packing, since 2008, unused. This is my blog report back then when I tested it:

http://www.puppylinux.com/news/news400a5-400a7.htm

The battery would be discharged after such a long time. I have the power adaptor connected, I get the orange battery light. If I press the power button, the green power-on lights up, but the screen remains black. I thought maybe I needed to wait awhile for the battery to charge, but after one hour, still no-go.

Anyway, I have been reading-up on booting. A good reference:

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Olpc.fth

...I don't know how much of that applies to my early-model XO.

Anyway, it seems pretty straightforward. If you have a normal bootable USB Flash drive, with one partition, say 1GB drive, fat16 filesystem. Perhaps play safe and use a small Flash drive of 1GB and fat16.

On the Flash drive, place my Quirky file, 'quir004.t00', rename it to 'vmlinuz' -- no particular reason, just playing safe, use a "normal" name for the kernel.

Create a file /boot/olpc.fth on the Flash drive, with this in it:

unfreeze
boot u:vmlinuz root=sda1 pmedia=usbflash

...docs indicate the "root=sda1" is required, it would be interesting to see if it worked without that parameter.

If booting from a SD card:

unfreeze
boot sd:vmlinuz root=mmcblk0p1

The above is theoretical, as I can't test it myself!

Clock battery
Read this about the clock battery in the OLPC. Maybe mine is dead.
http://en.forum.laptop.org/viewtopic.php?f=1324&t=164934

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Comments

RTC problem
Username: mavrothal
Just in case you missed it in the forum :-) This is a common problem with XOs (left dormant for a long time) related to RTC. You in the right track with the internal battery. The next 2 links may also help http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Fix_Clock http://en.forum.laptop.org/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=430&start=45#p533274 (and after) [url=http://www.olpcnews.com/sales_talk/g1g1/how_to_fix_bricked_g1g1_xo_lap.html]Here is a more sophisticated solution. But the [b]first thing[/b] is to [url=http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Manual_Firmware_Install]update the firmware to q2e41

Follow-up on fixing your XO
Username: culseg
"You will need a specific serial adapter to reset the bios and I have sent an email outlining a hopefully more local resource to help get this done. Message me at the Forum if I can help further. Sandy (Culseg at Forum)

Tags: quirky