#8410 NORM Opportu: Improve useability and usefulness of sd/sdhc cards

[Zarro Boogs per Child]

#8410: Improve useability and usefulness of sd/sdhc cards
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           Reporter:  hhardy  |       Owner:               
               Type:  defect  |      Status:  reopened     
           Priority:  normal  |   Milestone:  Opportunity  
          Component:  distro  |     Version:  not specified
         Resolution:          |    Keywords:               
        Next_action:  design  |    Verified:  0            
Deployment_affected:          |   Blockedby:               
           Blocking:          |  
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Comment(by gnu):

 Two simple changes would improve this a lot:

  * Include the "parted" RPM (the standard GNU partition editor program)
 and "gparted" (the GNOME GUI for it).
  * If the system detects an SD card with a swap partition on it, it should
 automatically start swapping to that partition (and if the SD card is ever
 ejected in software, it should automatically stop).  Similarly, if it
 detects a file called SWAPFILE in the root directory of an SD card, that's
 recognizable as a Linux swap file, it should swap on that.

 There are other bugs that might impact this (e.g. SD cards sometimes
 disappear on suspend/resume, which would crash the machine on the first
 suspend if its paging space
 was on the SD card).

 Making a control-panel shortcut to run "gparted" might also be easy.
 After installing it with yum, it appears to work, though it can't
 manipulate an SD card's partitions because the (%*($&*#$()@# "datastore"
 is in there mucking it up, preventing the existing partion from being
 unmounted.

 (Also, unfortunately, gparted doesn't recognize /dev/mmcblk0 as a device
 it ought to allow partitioning of automatically, though if you run
 "gparted /dev/mmcblk0" from the command line, it works.  Also, neither
 parted nor gparted recognizes nor can manipulate the strange kind of
 partitioning that OFW and the XO kernel implement in the NAND.  Since this
 is the tool and library for understanding partitions and filesystems,
 support for this partition scheme should be implemented here -- but that's
 not relevant to SD card support.)

-- 
Ticket URL: <http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/8410#comment:9>
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