[Marketing] press release opportunity...

[Caroline Meeks]

On Wed, Jul 29, 2009 at 3:18 PM, Gary C Martin <gary at garycmartin.com> wrote:

> On 29 Jul 2009, at 04:10, Caroline Meeks wrote:
>
>  This is a good idea!
>>
>> Can I also ask you and Tomeu to help me with another, complimentary
>> approach?
>>
>> As I hiked up the mountain on the weekend I got a lecture from one of my
>> friends on different file system options and journaling.  He has some time
>> to help us.  Today at the Expo I went to I met someone who had one of the
>> patents on USB sticks.  She is also willing to help us.
>>
>> I'd like to get our problems defined, resources and documentation linked
>> up and then put together some specific requests for help that I can put out
>> to my linkedin, facebook, and APO networks.
>>
>> Can you guys help me create the wiki pages that would let people
>> understand our problems and find what they need to learn easily for some of
>> the specific problems we don't know how to solve.
>>
>
> The most authoritative and frightening item I've read on this is from
> Mitch:
>
>        http://wiki.laptop.org/go/How_to_Damage_a_FLASH_Storage_Device
>
> There was a detailed discussion thread back in February at:
>
>        http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/devel/2009-February/022987.html
>
> I'm sure this is not the only culprit, but it's likely an important one.
>
> I'm no expert in the live image process but here's my current random theory
> for the login screen case anyway (to be proven wrong so we can move on
> please :-) A live image has a kind of overlay file where the actual users
> changes are being written, if a kid unplugs too early, or hits some other
> media write issue, that overlay could be corrupted. Likely loosing all user
> changes to the original base image (and some), the stick would still boot,
> but bail out when it hits the corrupt overlay. Dropping the user at a login
> prompt (but with nothing to login to as that part is corrupt). End of random
> theory.


This makes sense to me and I added it to the wiki.
http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_on_a_Stick/TODO#Sticks_are_dieing_a_lot_-_Make_sticks_more_robust

>
>
> You'd need to carefully analyse the broken stick images to resolve this
> one. Not sure of the tools you'd need.


Maybe.  I am currently very suspicious of our file formatting. I want to
know how it works and why it was chosen. then I want to find out why Open
Suse and other distributions picked their choices.

I don't have any information but its feeling like we have a "fine crystal"
file format and what we want is a file structure that wraps the files in
hard plastic so they will be ok even if a few bytes are disturbed.

Hopefully we'll get more info. Right now I feel like all I know is how
little we know. :)  Which is actually a useful piece of information.

>
>
> Regards,
> --Gary
>
>


-- 
Caroline Meeks
Solution Grove
Caroline at SolutionGrove.com

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