[IAEP] Experiences with Soas2-200904231400.iso Snapshot

[Caroline Meeks]

Hi James,

Thanks for testing!

We do have a "Boot Helper" CD iso on the wiki page. I personally think we
shoudl recommend that people start with that then see if they can change
thier BIOS so we have more first time success.



On Mon, Apr 27, 2009 at 5:46 PM, James Simmons <jim.simmons at walgreens.com>wrote:

> 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
>
> _______________________________________________
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>



-- 
Caroline Meeks
Solution Grove
Caroline at SolutionGrove.com

617-500-3488 - Office
505-213-3268 - Fax
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