So it was bound to happen – Sal spilled milk on his laptop’s keyboard and it’s sticky and 80% of the time, acts like the ctlr key is down, which makes using the computer very difficult. I thought I had an extra keyboard at work, but when we checked it out the other day, it had one of those old fashioned connectors instead of the USB one.
Last night, after about 6 weeks of Sal struggling around on his computer, he asked for the keyboard again. And I felt bad for him.
Earlier in the day, we were talking about getting a MacBook for him – Catherine feels like the 1 mouse button would be better for him, they’re under 999 bucks and I could mess around with iPhone apps with it.
But last night, when he asked for the keyboard, we got out his XO computer that we bought last year. We thought he wouldn’t be into it because it doesn’t support Flash and most of his computer sites are flashed based – LEGO Indiana Jones, LEGO Star Wars, StarFall, Disney…
So we got it out and he likes it cause it’s little and cute and it’s spill resistant. And so I start searching around to see if in the last year, there’s been any Flash news…and there has been. In fact, last month they had a pretty significant update to their software. Okay. Let’s upgrade!
Now, right there, we know, that if this all went smoothly, we wouldn’t be writing/reading about it right now. I went through 4 USB drives all giving me an error. I reformatted my Blackberry’s miniSD card to try and put the new XO image on it and tried that out. Still bad hash at #2EC.
Sigh. Worse yet, since the install got done up to 2EC the XO was, as people like to say, “bricked”.
Last desperation move – goto a version below the most recent and see if we can use that. Got past #2EC and we were good. While that was restarting, I noticed that there was a distinction between the XO build and the G1G1 build – though most links go deep to the XO build so this tidbit isn’t that obvious. G1G1 – Give one, get one. I had a G1G1 build. So got the latest for the G1G1 and tried that out. Twice (first cut and paste to the USB drive was my error…that stumped me for a bit…such is my life.)
So, about 18 hours later, we have a G1G1 on their most recent build. Whew. Now, searching for Flash at their site isn’t that useful, since they have lots of documents talking about their flash memory usage. Adobe is a better search. Do some command line downloading and then Flash version 10 is on the little guy. Uninstall their Gnash and reboot.
Then Sal’s favorite site – Starfall – is on the little laptop. He’s not really impressed, cause all he did was goto bed, eat breakfast, go shopping and take a nap, and now he’s got a little computer again. But I’m glad I dodged that Bricked bullet.
Now, I seem to remember someone saying something about SimCity on the OLPC…