[IAEP] [SoaS] A proposal from Trisquel (Was Re: [DP] Announcing the creation of a SoaS Decision Panel)

[Sean DALY]

Rubén, Apple Intel Macs can indeed boot from USB drive with the
"bless" command, see for example:

http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/sugar-devel/2009-September/019920.html
http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/iaep/2009-May/005882.html

A possible scenario I unfortunately haven't been able to test is to
create a sh script containing the bless command and named with the
".command" filename extension, which makes it an icon-clickable
executable script in the OSX interface.

Sean



2009/10/21 Rubén Rodríguez Pérez <ruben at gnu.org>:
>
>> 1). Live CD boots and runs fine on a MacBook Pro (though has no
>> wireless network, or camera support, and screen redraw was a little
>> slow in some activities so I guess no or little use of gfx hardware
>> acceleration).
>
> Trisquel is fully free, so we lack of several hardware drivers (no
> nvidia 3d support, several wifi cards do not work, etc).
>
>> 2). Using the Live CD to install trisquel-sugar to a USB stick (my
>> main test goal). WARNING DATA LOSS: Targeting a USB stick for the
>> install process worked smoothly, but right at the very end I spotted
>> it saying "installing grub to hd0". This renders the primary
>> internal hard disk on a Mac un-bootable. After much
>> experimentation***, the only safe solution was a fresh re-patrition
>> of the drive, and to perform a full restore from a back-up (thank
>> goodness for Apple's Time Machine).
>
> But you should not create a usb installation that way! A proper
> usb-creator is bundled in the iso, you can launch it using the
> terminal (a graphical launcher is on the go). The usb-creator utility
> builds a persistent live-usb drive, which will also run much
> faster than the installed-to-usb-disk method, and with no risk.
>
> You can read more about it in the wiki entry:
> http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Trisquel_On_A_Sugar_Toast
>
>> *** PRAM resets, Disk Utility volume recovery, re-setting start-up
>> disk, blessing from command line, re-install of OS, couple of other
>> 3rd party recovery tools.... [trim]
>
> I'm happy to see you managed to recover it :)
>
>> 3). The resulting USB Stick failed to boot on a MacBook (but might
>> work on other hardware, need to test).
>
> The apple bios cannot boot a usb drive, but you can use the live CD as
> a boot helper, you can read how to do that in the wiki entry too.
> (It will only work if you use the usb-creator to set up your stick).
>
> Thank you very much for your tests.
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