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

[Caroline Meeks]

On Fri, Jul 31, 2009 at 8:34 AM, James Cameron <quozl at laptop.org> wrote:

> 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.


Nod.

Note further down on this page backup and file recovery is listed. That is
in progress.

Interestingly enough I have seen kids pull the stick out at the wrong time
and that does not see to correlate with the stick failures based on
observation not strong data collection.

I would like to someday have a really robust solution that could recover
from that sort of catastrophic failure and even go through the washing
machine.  I think such is possible.

Right now I'd be happy if sticks rarely failed during normal usage.

>
>
> 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?


I have both working and nonworking sticks.  I could post images of them.

Can you send me instructions on how to create images from MacOSX?

Thanks!

>
>
> 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/
>



-- 
Caroline Meeks
Solution Grove
Caroline at SolutionGrove.com

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