[SoaS] Blueberry SoaS Mac feedback

[Gary C Martin]

Hi Wade,

On 12 Dec 2009, at 18:44, Wade Brainerd wrote:

> For Mac folks, I created a VirtualBox disk image from the Blueberry
> kickstart.  It works great on my Intel iMac running Snow Leopard.
> 
> http://people.sugarlabs.org/~wadeb/soas-blueberry-vdi.zip
> 
> (My filename choice is a bit poor since it actually contains a .vmdk file ;))
> 
> I also emailed the kickstart file to Sebastian; hopefully we'll see VM
> disk images as part of the regular stream going forward.

Fab, thanks. Just given it a quick run though and it's booting fine here in a VM on the Mac. Some quick notes (not aimed at you Wade, just of use to other that may try this route):

- Sound quality is more than a little crusty, but I think that is already a known distro issue.

- Default collaboration server is set to jabber.sugarlabs.org, but not sure how maintained it is, or what version it is running. The neighbourhood shows many buddies with identical colours to me, indicating something is broken (your owner colours are used by default on icons that are not getting the correct colour information).

- Without some VM hacking, VirtualBox displays Sugar in an 800x600 window. The interface scales reasonably well, all things considered, but toolbars often have missing widgets, or widgets in drop down overflow menus. Fonts are also very large for an 800x600 view.

So, it is usable and testable for Sugar geeks/hackers with Macs, but I'd not recommend it for real use by children as is.

Regards,
--Gary

> -Wade
> 
> On Sat, Dec 12, 2009 at 4:19 AM, Sean DALY <sdaly.be at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Hi Gary
>> 
>> I had a [drm] error message and the problem turned out to be a bad ISO.
>> 
>> And, the bad ISO had been downloaded on a Mac and reported as
>> successfully completed.
>> 
>> I would suggest trying again with an md5 verified ISO
>> 
>> Sean
>> 
>> 
>> On Sat, Dec 12, 2009 at 4:07 AM, Gary C Martin <gary at garycmartin.com> wrote:
>>> On 12 Dec 2009, at 01:52, Gary C Martin wrote:
>>> 
>>>> Hi,
>>>> 
>>>> Just a quick report after having spent the last hour or so trying to get a USB stick with SoaS Blueberry to boot on a MacBook Pro following the steps at:
>>>> 
>>>>       http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_on_a_Stick/Blueberry#For_Mac_OS_X_Users
>>>> 
>>>> 1). Having downloaded the .iso twice at different times, the md5 sum on that wiki page (4740da1026ab049b7781bbbdf21a8115) does not match the downloaded file (e0576a9e09d3eb13de46099c8d1ee74d), though the file size appeared correct on both occasions - 617,611,264 bytes (589M).
>>>> 
>>>> [above is a fairly big potential oops, but moving on and assuming the .iso file is indeed correct and just the md5 is out of date]
>>>> 
>>>> 2). The image-writer-mac script seemed to work nice and clearly to put the iso onto a 2GB USB stick, though I have no way to test the real result yet (no PC; MacBook Pro wont boot it though you can mount and browse the filesystem content; XO-1s OF think the USB stick has an unknown filesystem if you try to use them to boot/read it).
>>>> 
>>>> 3). Using the boot CD http://download.sugarlabs.org/soas/releases/soas-2-boot.iso seems to working, up to a point. Starting up the Mac with the alt key shows the CD as a bootable system (a few blinks from the USB led); boots to a sugar on a stick splash screen – 1 second delay auto boot (a few more USB blinks); black screen with cursor for ~10sec or so; and then:
>>>> 
>>>>       [drm] nouveau 0000:02:00.0: PRAMIN flush timeout
>>>> 
>>>> ...with a flashing cursor below, no keyboard access to do anything, have to just hard power off. Repeated a couple of times with the same result. Tried again in each of the 3 USB ports with same result, though with one port I had an extra message before above that read:
>>>> 
>>>>       hub 1-0:1.0: unable to enumerate USB device on port 1
>>>> 
>>>> 4) Tried booting the stick on XO-1s, but open firmware complains it has an unknown file system format, though it does mount OK once you boot into Sugar (from the nand).
>>>> 
>>>> I'll give it a try later booting in a VirtualBox VM (that worked for some previous SoaS builds before F12), and I'll also give it a shot after burning the image as a bootable CD (that used to work OK, though obviously read only and missing some mac friendly HW drivers). Not looking too good as far as native Mac support goes.
>>> 
>>> Last few tries of the evening. Just made a regular boot CD from the soas-2-blueberry ISO (Disk Utility is the easy way to do this). The Mac is happy to boot off the disk as far as the 'sugar on a stick' splash screen - 10 sec auto boot countdown, but then fails once it tries to go further with the same message:
>>> 
>>>        [drm] nouveau 0000:02:00.0: PRAMIN flush timeout
>>> 
>>> After some googling about, turns out to be the ever present case of unsupported video card drivers, so if you're a Mac user who isn't using and NVIDIA GeForce 9400M or NVIDIA GeForce 9600M GT you might still be in luck (perhaps things like a Mac Mini).
>>> 
>>> If at the splash screen I hit tab, tab to edit the boot parameters, adding "nomodeset" will get me into a nongraphical boot that works all the way up to just before X start's up, at which point the screen just goes black. Trying "nomodeset single" will boot all the way to a single user root prompt, at which typing startx will again give a black screen. I also gave "driver=vesa" a go but that was a "[drm] nouveau 0000:02:00.0: PRAMIN flush timeout" error.
>>> 
>>> If you're curious, google for "PRAMIN flush timeout" will turn up a bunch of Mac folks trying to run F12 (and F11 I think), some have eventually managed to hack things up by installing basic generic drivers (non-free most likely), but they were installing to HD so had a read/write filesystem to hack about on ;-)
>>> 
>>> My poor Mac has never seen so many reboots in one day! Oh well, back to my shiny, proprietary, apple flavoured interface of choice ;-b
>>> 
>>> Regards,
>>> --Gary
>>> 
>>>> Any one else seen a Mac natively boot Blueberry?
>>>> 
>>>> Regards,
>>>> --Gary
>>>> 
>>>> P.S. Finally signed up to the soas mail-list :-)
>>>> 
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