[Sugar-devel] Progress with SoaS boot-helper

[Tomeu Vizoso]

On Thu, May 28, 2009 at 21:23, Luke Faraone <luke at faraone.cc> wrote:
> 2009/5/28 Caroline Meeks <solutiongrove at gmail.com>
>>
>> On Thu, May 28, 2009 at 5:28 AM, Tomeu Vizoso <tomeu at sugarlabs.org> wrote:
>>>
>>> Hi Luke, can you point us to a link where we can learn more about what
>>> you are trying to accomplish?
>>
>> I think this is Ticket 598 to support the Gardner Pilot.  the use case is
>> here:
>> http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Gardner_Pilot_Academy#Critical_Path_Technical_Issues
>
> Yes, that's an accurate description of the goals for this project.
>
> An installable boot helper would provide functionality not avaliable in a
> normal boot-helper ISO, namely increasing boot time (time between a student
> inserting a SoaS stick and getting up and running) in addition to less
> down-time in between switches (as the machine would be able switch to
> another user/SoaS stick without rebooting).
>
> It would also be trivial to enable features such as on-server backups, live
> SoaS upgrades and repairs, and centralized administration by the IT staff.
>
> The boot-helper is related to a new installer method for this reason: our
> current method of formatting and installing SoaS on USB sticks cannot be
> read by the boot-helper. LVM snapshots are difficult to read outside of the
> context (in this case the kernel used in SoaS) in which they were created.
> Therefore, I suggested that we simply have raw EXT3/whatever on the flash
> drive, and mount them directly rather than using LVM.

Sounds very good, do we have a timeframe already for testing the first
results from this project?

Regards,

Tomeu

> --
> Luke Faraone
> http://luke.faraone.cc
>