Building OFW for OLPC

This page tells how to build the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) version of Open Firmware. This is the version of OFW that is normally shipped on that machine. You can get precompiled ROMs from http://dev.laptop.org/pub/firmware , so you only need to recompile from source if you want to change something. See http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Firmware for version history.

Software Requirements

• Open Firmware source code
• GCC and GNU make - most versions are okay for building OFW
• IASL (Intel ASL compiler, for compiling ACPI tables) - most Linux distributions have an “iasl” package.

Building Open Firmware

Get the Open Firmware source:

svn co svn://openfirmware.info/openfirmware

Build OFW:

cd openfirmware/cpu/x86/pc/olpc/build
make

The last line of the compilation output should say something like:

--- Saving as q2e24.rom

That tells you the name of the output file. You can install it in your OLPC XO computer by copying that file to a USB FLASH key, inserting the key into the XO, and typing on the XO:

ok flash u:\q2e24.rom