My G1G1 XO arrived today. I've never owned one before - all of the ones I've used have been loaners. Mm, my XO is giving me the... let's call it "the opportunity to test our donor technical issues support resources and troubleshooting documentation."

A number of fellow support-gang members think this is hilarious. I was originally frustrated over being unable to fix it myself, but Richard, Frances, and Adam confirmed that the brokenness wasn't with my support-fu, but with the networking hardware, and now I'm pretty amused.

I'm glad for this, actually. I wanted to see what it feels like to have a G1G1 issue, and what we're actually putting donors through. I'm going to try to write up the process as best I can here, as I go along.

  1. Box! Cardboard box! On my desk! My XO is here! I proceed to set personal speed records for demolishing cardboard boxes.
  2. Pop in the battery, plug it in, boot. Choose my name, choose my colors - ohmanohman, orange - and here comes Sugar, booting for the first time! I find myself looking at build 708, the older of the two builds that G1G1 XOs shipped with.
  3. Interesting. I can't connect to the internet. In fact, Neighborhood view is devoid of access points entirely. That's rare, but I've seen it happen twice before; the XO just didn't recognize the network device. Easiest fix is a reboot.
  4. Reboot. Nope. Reboot again. Nope. Huh. Maybe there's just something weird with the software image. I'm lazy, so let me get out my big hammer and clean-install it - basically, this wipes out your entire hard drive and replaces it with a ready-to-go working image. I use an image on a USB thumbdrive I've successfully reflashed XOs with before to reflash it.
  5. No dice. Reboot again. Nope, that doesn't do anything either.
  6. WelI then. Shall we?

Next up: MEL SMASH! or: The Diagnostics Begin.