[IAEP] Experiences with Soas2-200904231400.iso Snapshot

[James Simmons]

I tried using the latest snapshot with Smolt and have posted two 
hardware profiles on the hardware page.  Both are older computers that 
cannot boot off a USB stick directly.  I had first tried using the 
latest boot CD and while this seemed to boot OK I had no network 
access.  I am assuming that this is because the OS on the CD is 
different than the one on the stick.

I was able to resolve this using a boot diskette.  I can't find the 
reference on the Wiki to this product, but it's a free as in beer 
diskette that lets you choose what device to boot from even if the BIOS 
doesn't support it.  The problem with this diskette is that it will not 
recognize USB ports that are not connected to the mother board 
directly.  So I can boot using the USB 1.1 ports on the front of my 
computers but not the 2.0 ports on PCI cards in the back of the 
computers.  This was very slow but it did give me network access.

One thing I didn't realize was that Smolt requires you to have a stick 
for each hardware profile you create.  Once I figured this out I bought 
more sticks and redid my profiles in the Wiki.

The first stick let me create a hardware profile and send it to the 
server, but Browse would not come up.  I worked around this by saving 
the Terminal buffer to the Journal using the clipboard, then reverting 
the OS to the Beta while not overwriting home.  I used the Beta to 
create the Wiki table entry.  Before reverting I tested the snapshot and 
verified that networking and sound worked.  I did not test Read Etexts 
because without Browse working I was unable to download it.

The second stick went better.  Everything worked, and I was able to 
download Read Etexts and View Slides and try them out.  Read Etexts has 
a text to speech function that I wanted to test, and as in previous 
weeks the text highlighting lagged way behind the spoken words.  This 
doesn't happen on every computer, but it does happen on both of mine.  
An HP Vectra at work does not have this problem.  I want to add the 
profile for this machine to the Wiki but we use a special configuration 
script to set up a proxy server at work.  I can do this for Mozilla on 
Linux but I don't know how to make this work with Browse, etc. in 
Sugar.  If anyone has ideas I'd like to hear them.

There is a fair amount of interest in TTS with highlighting even though 
Read Etexts is the only Activity that supports it, and it might be 
worthwhile to find out what the machines it works on have in common so 
we can make the gstreamer espeak plugin work reliably everywhere.

In addition to Browse not being able to launch on the first stick I 
tried I had problems launching View Slides on the second stick.  The 
week before I couldn't launch Tam Tam Mini or Hablar Con Sara on the 
Beta.  These applications all work fine in my Fedora 10 Sugar test 
environment.  It seems to be a general flakiness with unpacking 
Activities.  I use 4 GB SanDisk Cruzer Micro sticks, a popular brand 
sold at Costco.

James Simmons