A really long time ago I went to the X.Org conference in Chicago. It was actually the first tech conference I went to. At one point I nervously poured cream into the coffee tray instead of my cup; at a different point I signed up for a list to receive a developer version of the XO 1.75. The OLPC did actually send me one, but it was
bricked...and having just started with Linux I was pretty intimidated by the idea of disassembling a laptop and using a terminal emulator to fix the firmware.
It's the holiday weekend in Chicago and I needed some distraction from studying for finals, so I decided to see if I could finally follow through and unbrick the XO. Somehow I always manage to misplace all of my Phillips-head screwdrivers, but after a while I found one \o/ (it was in the pencil holder :/). Soon the laptop looked like this:
I connected the serial adapter to the XO. The directions said to use a USB type A to type B connector to connect the serial adapter to the host computer. Unfortunately that was vague. I spent some time Googling and looking at pictures before I gave up, wandered over to my desktop computer, and started unplugging anything that looked promising. It turned out that the printer to USB cable was the right one.
I installed the Screen package on Fedora, changed some permissions so Screen could access the new firmware that I had on a USB drive, installed the new firmware via the terminal emulator, and then I was done :)
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