[Sugar-devel] What operating system should I put on the donated computers for SoaS at the GPA

[Bill Bogstad]

On Tue, Sep 1, 2009 at 1:56 PM, Caroline
Meeks<caroline at solutiongrove.com> wrote:
> Anurag a CS student at BU, my husband, a CS grad from MIT and I, a techie
> never give upper, are going to be working on Monday to take the pile of
> computers in my house and prepare them for installing in the GPA school on
> Weds.
> We will be wiping all the hard disks and putting on something else.
> Can I put install some version of the boothelper on the hard drive so when
> it boots off of the hard drive it automatically looks for a USB?

Probably yes,  See below for more.

> I think
> this would be preferred especially for older computers that don't let us set
> the bios for USB boot preference.
> Perhaps with newer computers we should install Sugar locally and make it the
> "Room 33" user so that guests can get access with out a stick.
> Thoughts? help?

A boot menu could allow this.  Will require at least some config file
investigation/changes.  Also, I understand the the current beta for
SoaS 2 has a method to install to a hard drive and it would be best to
remain compatible with that.  Unfortunately, I know nothing about how
it works.

> Got a good answer? Put it here for future
> deployments: https://answers.launchpad.net/soas/+question/81627
> We will also use this for tracking what I do and documenting results.

The floppy boot helper (using kexec-loader) that I've been working on
with you does the initial boot via syslinux.  Respinning it to boot
from a hard drive is therefore theoretically easy as syslinux can be
used on hard drivers as well as floppies.  However, how to create an
easy to use UI to get it installed to the hard drive isn't immediately
obvious to me.

Alternatively, the current CD helper uses isolinux for it's initial
boot which is part of the same suite of programs as syslinux.
Syslinux can used more or less as a drop in replacement for isolinux.
 Therefore the CD helper method could also be theoretically respun,
but with identical install issues as the floppy helper.

Bill Bogstad

Technical notes:  A fundamental difference between the CD helper and
the Floppy helper is that the CD helper actually contains the SoaS
kernel and ramdisk and only points to the Flash drive to get the root
and /home filesystems.  The floppy helper actually reads the SoaS
kernel/ramdisk off of the USB stick at boot time.  As a result, I
believe that the floppy helper is less likely to need to be respun for
new releases of SoaS.  OTOH, the floppy helper makes no use of the
BIOS to read/find the SoaS and if the floppy helper doesn't have a
driver for hardware you want to boot from the BIOS doesn't help.