[Sugar-devel] Finally got a Soas stick booting an XO

[Gary C Martin]

Hi All,

I finally got a Soas stick (based on Soas2-200906031834.iso) booting  
from an XO after sitting down again for an hour or so and poking about  
the wiki instructions. The current wiki instructions did lead me a  
little astray, but before I go edit (too much) I wanted to email the  
list as a sanity check.

OK, working from (and wanting to correct), with the goal of making a  
USB stick that will boot an XO into the latest Sugar on a Stick:

	http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_on_a_Stick/Installation/OLPC#On_Fedora 
:

Issues encountered:

1) no where is it mentioned which version of Fedora the instructions  
are known to work with.

2) the livecd-iso-to-disk script that my up-to date Fedora 10 install  
has knows nothing of the XO and fails showing a command usage display  
of accepted parameters.

3) I could find nowhere that indicated where a recent livecd-iso-to- 
disk script could be found, most googling returned old versions or  
patch emails for livecd-iso-to-disk that didn't say even where the  
scripts repository was. With some lateral thinking I realised that the  
Soas image itself actually has a copy of livecd-iso-to-disk on it, so  
you can mount the .iso, copy out the script from /LiveOS, and then use  
it directly.

4) the instruction "sudo livecd-iso-to-disk --format --xo --xo-no-home  
Soas2-200906031834.iso /dev/sdX1 Where /dev/sdX1 is the device  
associated with your removable media" had me spinning for a while, it  
looks like it goes through all the motions of building, creating, and  
reports happy shinny success messages – but the USB stick looked  
identical to before and did not boot.

5) the trick seems to be to use just "/dev/sdX" and not the "1" (or  
whatever) at the end. Lot's of USB led flashing this time resulting in  
a working USB boot stick!

6) when booting on an XO, remember too hold down the tick (right) game  
pad button as you start-up, otherwise the Open Firmware will keep the  
screen display frozen and you'll only ever see the grey XO on a white  
background (though it does boot fine).

Corrections/addendums most welcome, and then I'll will go edit the  
wiki :-)

Regards,
--Gary