[Sugar-devel] Bill Bogstad's floppy disk boot (Soas)

[Art Hunkins]

Bill,

Great job, and well thought-out.

Timeout 0 works fine; it's real easy to edit the kexec-loader.conf too.

Art Hunkins

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Bill Bogstad" <bogstad at pobox.com>
To: "Art Hunkins" <abhunkin at uncg.edu>
Cc: "iaep" <iaep at lists.sugarlabs.org>; "Sugar-dev Devel" 
<sugar-devel at lists.sugarlabs.org>; <community-news at lists.sugarlabs.org>; 
"Walter Bender" <walter.bender at gmail.com>
Sent: Friday, September 11, 2009 8:56 PM
Subject: Re: [Sugar-devel] Bill Bogstad's floppy disk boot (Soas)


> On Fri, Sep 11, 2009 at 12:00 PM, Art Hunkins <abhunkin at uncg.edu> wrote:
>> With regard to Bill Bogstad's floppy boot disk project for SoaS: it works
>> flawlessly for me. (I've tried it successfully on both an older Windows
>> laptop and desktop - vintages: Pentium II/III.)
>
> Thanks for the feedback!  I wasn't aware that Walter was going to
> announce it this week so I quickly went and put
> a README.html file at the location he published so people would have
> some idea what to do with it.
>
>> I've one suggestion for Bill: for use by children, I'd make everything as
>> automatic as possible. Either delete the display where the user needs to
>> make a choice (it's *way* technical and *I* didn't know what to do), or 
>> put
>> a (10"?) auto-timer on it so that it goes on through (the usual way) 
>> without
>> user intervention.
>
> It's easy to put a timeout in or even eliminate the delay entirely.
> Because a floppy is easily writable (unlike a CD) you
> can even do it yourself.  There is a text file called
> kexec-loader.conf on the floppy.  You should be able to edit it with
> any
> text editor and change the line "timeout off" to have a number
> instead.   It can be either 0 (boot immediately) or wait the specified
> number of seconds.  If you look at the rest of the file you can get
> some idea of what is going on.
>
> It's probably a good time for me to point out that I didn't write the
> software.   I just found it and worked with the author to fix some
> bugs/suggest features that made it work better for GPA.  You can find
> more info about it at:
> www.solemnwarning.net/kexec-loader.  The image I supplied is based on
> the authors most recent release 2.1.1.
>
> Speaking of GPA (who originally requested it), the 'wait for user
> input' is a good thing for their usage case.. They use a shared
> computer lab and wanted to be able to have an instructor go around the
> room inserting floppies and turning machines one before the students
> get there.   (Booting from floppy is slow.)  My understanding is that
> they plan to have students come in, insert their stick into an already
> powered up machine, hit enter, and then go over what they plan to do
> during that computer
> lab with the instructor.  Other environments may want something
> different.  Since floppies are writable changing timeouts and the menu
> text is straightforward.
>
>> For Windows people: I suggest creating the boot disk with RAWriteWin. 
>> It's
>> simple, user-friendly and efficient.
>
> Thanks for the info.  I was hoping there was something other then
> rawrite.exe, but I hadn't researched it.
>
> Take care,
> Bill Bogstad
> _______________________________________________
> Sugar-devel mailing list
> Sugar-devel at lists.sugarlabs.org
> http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel