[Sugar-devel] Progress with SoaS boot-helper

[Sean DALY]

On a related subject, I am also actively researching Mac USB boot
methods. A few weeks ago an Ubuntu developer posted
(http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=995704&page=77) a "fat" .EFI
boot file compatible with both 32-bit and 64-bit Intel Macs. Ubuntu
has a useful matrix of compatible Macs at
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MactelSupportTeam/CommunityHelpPages#Determine%20your%20model%20and%20hardware%20revision

There are other possibilities too, such as:
http://www.puredarwin.org/developers/booting/efiboot

And, GRUB info for booting Linux on Mac:
http://grub.enbug.org/TestingOnEFI also
http://grub.enbug.org/TestingOnMacbook


To my mind, it's worth investigating these solutions (based on a
clickable icon OSX bash script on the SoaS USB stick, containing the
bless command but requiring admin rights) since the result will be
very easy to use and won't touch the hard disk.

Sean







On Fri, May 29, 2009 at 4:49 PM, Tomeu Vizoso <tomeu at sugarlabs.org> wrote:
> 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
>>
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