[Sugar-devel] Sugar on a Stick File Structure - Summary of problems and potential solutions

[Mathieu Bridon (bochecha)]

My original response went only to you (it seems like I'm having more
and more of this, sorry about that) so you in turn only replied to me.

Here it is for all the list to benefit :)

On Sun, Aug 2, 2009 at 01:12, Caroline Meeks<caroline at solutiongrove.com> wrote:
> All,
> This was my attempt to put together a list from the brainstorming we have
> been doing so we can all look at it, generate more ideas and decide which
> ones we can eliminate.
>
> Hi Mathieu,
> Thanks, I didn't know that a full install still wouldn't be readable on a
> windows machine.  I;d be interested if anyone has any ideas.
> Its not unusual for things you want to optimize to be correlated negatively
> or positively.
> Also the things to be optimized are not necessarily things that are wrong
> with the current system for instance it excels at size.
> Mathieu, can you tell me more or point me to documentation about the
> Overlay?

Jeremy Katz, one of the Fedora devs that worked on the liveCD/USB
technology we use in Fedora already answered and shared some light in
the other thread where you were asking for more information (I had put
him in CC). You should definitely bounce on his answer if you still
need more, I think he's one of the people with the most knowledge on
this matter :)

> Walter,
> We are clearly
> mis understanding each other somewhere.  Would it help if I changed
>  "Solutions currently being considered:" to
> "Potential Solutions we are currently considering testing to see if they
> work and how they compare on the things we want to optimize for:"
> I'll start another thread about failures and what we know about them within
> the next 48 hours.
> Walter, can your OpenSuse USB can be read by Windows?

Except if the OpenSUSE key uses FAT32 (or NTFS) as a filesystem, I
doubt it will (and I really doubt those are used on a Linux live
system :)


> On Sat, Aug 1, 2009 at 6:46 PM, Mathieu Bridon (bochecha)
> <bochecha at fedoraproject.org> wrote:
>>
>> Hi,
>>
>> > To be acceptable a solution should solve all of these problems.
>>
>> >   2. Allow a VM system to read user files and thus allow us to create a
>> > VM that
>> > can switch users
>> >   3. Allow a user to put the stick into a windows/mac/linux machine and
>> > find
>> > their files
>>
>> This is always going to be a problem. For exemple, the default Linux
>> filesystem (at least on Fedora) is ext3 or ext4. Windows can't read
>> those filesystems (without adding some experimental software), so even
>> a full install will not solve this issue.
>>
>> > Things we wish to optimized
>> >
>> >   1. Ability to work with poor quality sticks
>> >   3. Amount of abuse the stick can take and still work
>>
>> Those 2 seem rather contradictory, and I'm not sure there's a lot that
>> can be done in software, at least in Sugar world :)
>>
>> >   2. Size of stick needed
>> >   4. Size of download to create the stick
>> >   5. Time it takes to create the stick
>>
>> Those three are intimately related. If we can make the image as small
>> as possible, it should be faster to create it.
>>
>> >   6. Easy user experience creating the stick
>>
>> What exactly are the problems ? Speaking only for myself, I never had
>> a problem creating a SoaS USB (but I might not be representative of
>> your target population :). Were all usability issues reported upstream
>> ?
>>  https://fedorahosted.org/liveusb-creator/
>
> Live USB Creator works great! Its been a tremendous boon in getting people
> to try Sugar. I did report a bug, I think it was fixed.  I don't know if you
> are behind the LiveUSB creator for windows but please tell whoever did it
> thank you!
> However, our Sugar on a Stick in a classroom use case will require us to
> create our own. We need something that lets a teacher pick what activities
> and language the kids should have and probably preload some content then
> clone sticks with all those settings but without the name and the key we use
> for collaboration.  We'll want something that works from within Sugar.  We'd
> love help with this project!
> A teacher will need to make 20-30 sticks or if they are the computer teacher
> for the whole school (this is common in the US) 100-300 sticks.  We would
> thus like something that can use a standard cheap 4-8 USB port and create
> multiple USB sticks without user intervention between sticks.  Do you know
> of any existing solutions for that?
>>
>> > Solutions currently being considered:
>> >
>> >   2. Full install of Fedora
>>
>> As I said, this will not fix the issue of accessing files from Windows
>> (no idea from Mac OS X).
>
> Darn!
>>
>>
>> ----------
>>
>> Mathieu Bridon (bochecha)
>
>
>
> --
> Caroline Meeks
> Solution Grove
> Caroline at SolutionGrove.com
>
> 617-500-3488 - Office
> 505-213-3268 - Fax
>

Best regards,


----------

Mathieu Bridon (bochecha)