OFW sad face doesn't say why

[Eben Eliason]

On Fri, Jul 18, 2008 at 4:29 PM, Mitch Bradley <wmb at laptop.org> wrote:

> If you hold down the check key while booting, the firmware will give
> additional information about the boot progress, in both iconic and textual
> form.
>
> I put in the sad face because I needed some way to indicate failure.  The
> published design specified what is supposed to happen when everything works
> but didn't give detailed guidance for the myriad of possible failure
> scenarios.
>

I see.  So this isn't the "we couldn't find a lease" screen. Its a
"something weird happened" screen instead? Do we still have the lock icon
 "couldn't find a lease" screen in place as specified?  Mitch, what might
actually be best is if you could write a ticket (or tickets) for all of the
cases you need to handle, so I can make a mockup of what they should look
like in the future.  (I'll assume that we don't have a) access to user
colors b) access to animation c) access to translation in all cases unless
otherwise noted.)  This would include cases like "you need to plug into AC
power to continue" as well.  I'll see what I can do, and hopefully we can
make the feedback all much more meaningful and reliable.


> Note that, in the normal (no check key) case, there is no SD icon - at NN's
> insistence.
>

Interesting, I hadn't noticed that (I guess I need to update).  What's the
reasoning there?  Isn't the SD card a valid place for a lease file?

- Eben


>
>
> Eben Eliason wrote:
>
>  On Fri, Jul 18, 2008 at 2:57 PM, Mikus Grinbergs <mikus at bga.com <mailto:
>> mikus at bga.com>> wrote:
>>
>>    Happened to put in laptop BB a SD card copied over from laptop AA.
>>    Pushed power-on, laptop BB showed me a sad face and powered down.
>>
>>    Figured out why -- that SD card had a directory on it called
>>    /security, and in that directory there was a file called
>>    develop.sig.  Since this file's content did not match BB's identity,
>>    BB powered down.  I erased that file - then BB would boot o.k.
>>
>>
>>    If you have a cheap SD card, and an enemy with an XO, why not create
>>    /security/develop.sig on that SD card, and surreptitiously insert
>>    that SD card into his OLPC - he would be extremely UNLIKELY to think
>>    of examining the sd-card-slot for the cause of his XO not booting.
>>
>>    If the OFW identified its reason for not proceeding with booting,
>>    this opportunity for mischief would not work.
>>
>>
>> Hmm, A big lock icon is supposed to appear when no lease is found.  A sad
>> face was never part of the design; I wonder if that slipped in as a
>> temporary placeholder and never got fixed.  Mitch, do you know where this
>> lives (I assume firmware, but maybe not), and if it's possible to clean up
>> with little effort?
>>
>> It seems to me that we should only be doing positive checks, not negative,
>> against the security info in external devices.  It should simply move on and
>> illustrate that no valid key was found (adding the lock icon next to the SD
>> icon, for instance). It shouldn't be possible to prevent an XO from booting
>> at all if any of the devices (including the XO itself) have a valid key,
>> right?
>>
>> - Eben
>>
>>
>
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