[Sugar-devel] Alpha test Floppy boot helper for SoaS available for download

[Bill Bogstad]

If you go to:

http://people.sugarlabs.org/~bogstad/floppy/

you will see a rev4-floppy.img file.

http://people.sugarlabs.org/~bogstad/floppy/rev4-floppy.img

Download the binary file and write it to a 3.5 (1.44Mbyte) floppy.
(probably use dd under Linux or rawrite.exe under Windows/DOS)

Put it in a machine and boot it.  Eventually you should get a simple
text menu display that says "Insert USB stick and hit ENTER to boot".
Insert the stick, wait a few seconds for the system to see it.  (You
can hit D to see what disks the system currently sees.)  Hit ENTER
and it should boot from your USB stick.

Possible issues:

1. Your floppy must be a standard (internal) floppy.  USB or external
floppy drives are untested and probably won't work.  Symptom would
probably be that you get an error message about kexec-loader being
unable to find it's boot device.  (This is probably fixable if it
matters.)

2. There were some issues with PS/2 vs. USB keyboards.  I believe they
have been fixed.

3. Your SoaS USB stick must have had the FEDORA label on the MSDOS
filesystem when you created it.  I believe the CD boot helper has the
same
restriction.

4.  Since the floppy is using it's own (linux) USB stack, if you have
an unusual USB card the driver might not be there.  This will probably
show up as the USB stick
never showing up when you hit the 'D' key instead of ENTER.

Since this is SoaS related, please report bugs at:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/soas

Thanks,
Bill Bogstad