[OLPC-AU] XO care and maintenance

[Sridhar Dhanapalan]

These are some rough notes for caring for your XO, diagnosing problems, and
recovering from failure. I put these together as an early part of developing
our support materials.

Apologies for the HTML.

I think it is important to emphasise best practices for XO use, to prevent
problems from occurring in the first place:

   - keep away from water, extreme heat/cold, etc.
   - limiting exposure to static electricity (electro-static discharge -
   ESD)
   - this is what caused our WLAN problems, so we should take it seriously
      - it happens more often in dry climates (e.g. deserts or air
      conditioning)
      - plastic bags, carpet, fleecy clothing, etc. can cause this


Problems should be effectively diagnosed before repairs are attempted:

   - http://www.laptop.org/en/laptop/start/troubleshooting.shtml
   - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/XO_Troubleshooting_Guide
   - most problems go away by restarting Sugar/GNOME (Ctrl+Alt+Erase) or
   rebooting the XO
   - sometimes an OS reflash is the best option
   - if the XO doesn't turn on properly, try
      - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/XO_Full_Reset
      - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Startup_diagnosis
      - the OpenFirmware tests will test the hardware
      - you can turn on the XO holding the left rocker switch to start
      unattended self-tests
      - on an XO-1.5, run the 'menu' command (this will be a menu item on
      the XO-AU USB)
      - run the 'memtest' command for a more detailed memory test (this will
      be a menu item on the XO-AU USB)
      - run '.mfg-data' to get important manufacturing data that may help us
      (this will be a menu item on the XO-AU USB)
   - if the problem is to be reported to us, as much useful information as
   possible should be collected and sent so that we have something to work with


For repairs:

   - listing the tools required, and additional tools that can be useful (
   http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Disassembly)
   - when disassembling the XO, even more care should be taken about ESD:
   the easiest thing to do is to ground oneself, either by touching a metal
   object or (ideally) using an anti-static wrist strap
   - that removed screws should be placed in a small cup so that they don't
   get lost
   - spare screws are held inside the handle
   - the ribbon cables connecting the screen are very fragile - take care
   when (dis)connecting them
   - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Simple_repairs
   - torn keyboards can be repaired
      - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Keyboard_field_repairs
      -
      http://www.olpcnews.com/hardware/keyboard/xo_keyboard_hacking_paper_temp.html
   - most repair instructions are made for the XO-1
      - the primary difference internally is that the WLAN and microSD cards
      on the XO-1.5 are removable
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