[Sugar-devel] Reducing Stick Failures - Was Re: [Marketing] press release opportunity...

[James Cameron]

I've arrived late.  I've been listening to this discussion for a week.

A general comment ... if any state is preserved by the children on the
USB sticks, and there is no copy of the state kept elsewhere, and there
is a possibility of power failure, premature removal, or other
interruptions, then every software component that uses the saved state
must be either capable of detecting corruption of the saved state, or
graceful recovery from apparently invalid state.

It seems that there are a large number of software components involved.
Each one would have to be considered.  Sounds like an interesting
challenge.  The way I would approach it is to evaluate the saved state
between a working and non-working USB stick.  Are these images available
for analysis?  Would you like technical instructions for capturing
images next time the problem happens?

My understanding of the Linux based Sugar software stack is that there
are many components which could enter a state where they would not
start.

Back tomorrow.

-- 
James Cameron
http://quozl.linux.org.au/