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

[Bill Bogstad]

On Sun, Sep 13, 2009 at 10:48 AM, Caroline Meeks
<solutiongrove at gmail.com> wrote:
> I tested this on the GPA computer lab computers. It takes about 1 more
> minute (4.5 vs 3.5) to boot.  I think that it will take more then a minute
> on average to give all the students CDs, have them open the CD drawer, turn
> off the computer, turn it on again and collect all the CD at the end of
> class so that the next class boots into Windows.  My plan is the floppies
> can just live in the machines, not pushed in all the way.
> The current version requires the user to press enter 1 minute into the process.
> Can we get a version that we just start the boot, then goto the rug for our lesson and
> 4.5 minutes later the machines are booted?

As I already mentioned in my note to Art, it's easy to edit the
kexec-loader.conf file to set the delay to anything you
want by modifying the "timeout off" line in that file.  You can do
this yourself easily.

I was under the impression that the students 'owned' their sticks and
took them home from the GPA.  In that scenario, it makes no sense for
the machine to finish to attempt booting until the student arrives at
the classroom and can insert their personal stick.  If you are using
generic SoaS sticks, then you can modify the config file to boot
immediately as Art did.

WARNING WARNING WARNING

You may find that this doesn't work on some machines.  On my test
machine, if you have a USB stick inserted when you power it up; it
won't boot at all (from anything).  The BIOS apparently gets confused
and just gives up.  WIthout changing the BIOS, there is no way to get
around this problem.  If you have a machine like this, you will have
to come back to the machine after the BIOS gets done anyway.  Having a
prompt made sense in that scenario and I made configured the image
that way since
I didn't think it would hurt in the use cases I was considering.
Change it, it's easy...

Good Luck,
Bill Bogstad