OLPC Little Green Machines!

Hey Brian,

Taking a look, I believe that the error is quite a serious one that I can't really fix - it has something to do (again) with the faulty RTC clocks that went with the XO-1s. To fix it requires something that is beyond my technical know-how (as well as the XO serial adapter):

from http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Fix_Clock

If the screen does not turn on

Very old versions of OpenFirmware for the XO-1 laptop had a bug which would cause the screen to fail to power up when this RTC clock problem was encountered. If this happens, the recovery procedure involves linking up a special cable to another computer, and then using that other computer to reprogram the time and date.

As there are numerous opporuntities for error, it is suggested practice to test serial console communications with a known good laptop before debugging broken ones!

1. Using an OLPC serial adapter, connect the laptop to your personal laptop. On the laptop's motherboard, the serial adapter should be connected to J1. J1 is a small white connector near the wireless module.
2. Use a program like minicom (for Linux) or HyperTerminal (for Windows) to access the laptop serially
3. The serial port settings should be 115200 baud, 8 data bits, no parity, and 1 stop bit and handshake parameter is disabled.
4. Power on the laptop under test. You should see "Page Fault" on the serial terminal, followed by an "ok" prompt. If you don't see "Page Fault", there are several possibilities:
   • If you don't see anything on the serial terminal, either
     • The serial terminal is not connected correctly, or
     • Something else is wrong with the machine - the machine is quite quite dead and it's not an instance of the symptom 1 RTC problem.
   • If you see a lot of startup messages, and the last one isn't "Page Fault" followed by "ok", then the machine is not suffering from the known RTC problem.

Using the "other" laptop that is connected serially to the affected XO, type these commands at the ok prompt (hitting enter after each one):

ok select /rtc
ok decimal
ok sec min hour day month year set-time

sec, min, hour, day, etc in the previous command should be numbers correlating to the current date. For the current time:

ok 52 54 00 23 10 2010 set-time

At this point, you are strongly advised to perform a firmware update to a version that does not suffer from this blank-screen problem. That way, if the RTC loses power again, your diagnosis/recovery procedure will not be as painful.

1. Insert a USB key containing the latest firwmare version. You will need to download the .rom file and place it on the key.
2. To update the firmware, type the following command line at the ok prompt, substituting the correct .rom filename:

 ok probe-pci probe-usb flash u:\q2d16.rom