[OLPC-devel] Re: boot OLPC laptop from USB flash drive?

[Richard Smith]

On 8/19/06, Richard Smith <smithbone at gmail.com> wrote:

> > OLPC guys -- this transition is important enough that I think it should
> > be on the front page -- I can't find it.
> >
> > Zach -- you have to make the change, so let's see if we can help you.
>
> Zach,
>
> If you don't mind being an Alpha tester I have have put together a
> bootstrap procedure for moving from Insyde BIOS to LinuxBIOS.

2 Issues with my last post:

1. I failed to attach my tarball to the last post.  Which is probably
a good thing I'm not if the list will be crasy over a 3 meg
attachemnt.

2. It was brought to my attention that it was really too complicated.
Therefore I've created a 5 meg dd copy that you can just dd out to
your USB disk.  Its comes complete with a copy of linuxbios.rom.
All you do is:

bzip2 -d bootstrap.img.bz2
dd if=bootstrap.img of=/dev/sda

The stick it in the OLPC and boot.  Once booted:
mkdir /key
mount /dev/sda1 /key
cd /key
olpcflash -w linuxbios.rom
olpcflash -v linuxbios.rom

I just don't have any where to put my 'bootstrap.img.bz2' It's 4 MiB.

Zach I'll send it to you directly.

-- 
Richard A. Smith