Upgrade the OS
If you obtained one of the units in the initial OLPC shipment, the first thing you'll want to do is upgrade the OS from the default 650 to a newer version. You can quickly determine the installed OS version by hitting Ctrl+Alt+F2 (the circle with three dots). Your XO will jump over to an alternate shell that will list the OS version in the top line. When you're done, hit Ctrl+Alt+F3 (the circle with one dot) to return to the GUI.
Our results:
OLPC build 653 (stream ship.2; variant devel_jffs2) Kernel 2.6.22-20071121.7.olpc.af3dd731d19395d03 on an i586
If you can see that you're not using a version greater than or equal to 653, you'll want to do the following to upgrade the OLPC: Open a terminal window, and type su –l to drop to root access. Then type olpc-update –rn 653 to update to version 653. (If a newer version is available, you can update to that.)
Assuming you're connected to a wireless network, the XO will initiate the update process, download the necessary files, and install them. If only all OS updates were this simple!