Notes for the OLPC Devboards
- The additional hardware recommended for installing
software can be found at the wiki.For
our tests we used a USB flash (must be >=512MB) and a
USB-to-PS/2 adapter for keyboard and mouse.
- The on-board NAND Flash needs to be configured from the
Insyde BIOS as described
here
- The Insyde BIOS cannot boot from the on-board NAND Flash.
That's why a LinuxBIOS solution
is under development. It is not yet stable. LinuxBIOS will
boot a linux kernel with the appropriate drivers and then
read and boot the kernel in the NAND Flash.
- The development team released instructions
for flashing the serial flash with LinuxBios.
- Note also that the Insyde BIOS in the boards will stop
working August 26 (devel-boards
list). A simple work-around for this problem would be to
set back the the time back on the board.
- The software for the laptop is under heavy development at
this time. The development team releases frequently build
images, that can be copied to a usb disk or flash. There are
more details in the Build Images page of
the wiki.
- History of the status of some latest releases:
- In order for the driver for the wlan adapter to work, one
needs to download the firmware of the card which is not
distributed (at this time) with the image. The firmware image
can be downloaded from
marvell.com and needs to be placed at
/lib/firmware/usb8388.bin. This can be done either by
mounting the image or the usb flash/disk. More details can be
found at the
README file of the driver. Note that you should
not attempt to use the wireless unless you have
installed antennae due to some chance of overloading the
transmitter, which may damage the it. So the driver
should not be loaded without the antennae
attached.
- A summary of the procedure for booting and OS Image from
a USB disk is as follows: