[SoaS] [Sugar-devel] SOAS 2 problems

[David Leeming]

I am sorry that I am a little slow on the uptake. Blueberry SOAS2 seems to work OK. I have used LiveUSBCreator and it's installed on a flash drive. Is this what you are recommending? We have done this on several PCs and notebooks and it is fine, although I admit we haven't really pushed it. 

Are you saying that there is a risk that whilst in use, there is a chance that they could render it inoperable? If so, no worries as it can simply be re-flashed, we can live with that.   


-----Original Message-----
From: Bernie Innocenti [mailto:bernie at codewiz.org] 
Sent: Sunday, 24 January 2010 1:46 a.m.
To: Peter Robinson
Cc: David Leeming; Martin Langhoff; Michael Hutak; Jim Simmons; Daniel J. Clark; soas
Subject: Re: [SoaS] [Sugar-devel] SOAS 2 problems

On Sat, 2010-01-23 at 08:53 +0000, Peter Robinson wrote:

> You can also use the upstream liveinst to install to a usb drive. You
> need a second stick (or a real liveCD) so that you boot the live image
> off one and install to the other. I've done it before and it works
> well. 

Ah, didn't know there were two different tools. ZyX is also in Fedora,
and Warren Togami told me recently that the livecd-tools are currently
unmaintained. He's been doing some bug fixing, but has no time to do any
real development. When I asked live iso/usb questions on #fedora-devel,
none of the core developers seemed to know (or care) much about it :-(

Separate from the tools issues, I guess it would be nice to our users if
we could provide a ready-to-use downloadable usb image which doesn't
require any special tool besides dd (or something like RAWRITE.EXE on
winblows).

One problem with plain images is that you need to decide the size ahead
of time. The partition size is hard-coded in the DOS partition table.
Even if the partition table were flexible, ext2/3/4 needs to be re-sized
manually (although this could be done online and quickly on first boot).

I agree with Sebastian that we should work with upstream to find a
solution, since these issues are bothering Fedora as much as SoaS. We
might want to look at how other live distros solved these problems. I'll
ask around :-)

-- 
   // Bernie Innocenti - http://codewiz.org/
 \X/  Sugar Labs       - http://sugarlabs.org/