[SoaS] Using SoaS Blueberry to emulate OLPC F11 builds

[Thomas C Gilliard]

Martin;

why not use zyx-liveinstaller,which generates a real file system, to 
make the First USB Stick?
Link: http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_on_a_Stick/ZyX-LiveInstaller
This way there is no danger of overlay corruption. You can thus proceed 
with you customization with yum.
4GB is a minimum size you can use for this....*

Alternatively you could use liveinst (Anaconda) to make your USB stick.
The advantage is that you can do a dd copy of it to an .img file. Use 
this to make copies via dd of the .img file to each USB
If this is done before it has run firstboot. The root password is set on 
running liveinst but the user info,etc
gets written on first boot of each copied stick.

The F12 net install.iso can also be used to make a custom USB ie: gnome 
+ sugar-desktop via a fast internet connection
thus you will have a gdm login with gnome/sugar selection (like the 
Fedora education nightly composes which is currently broken)
see: http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/VMware#Appliances_with_Persistence for 
more info. (It works for USB sticks also)

* Note that gnome + sugar may require 8GB USB's

I have been very successful with Toshiba & Lexar Firefly 4GB USB sticks 
both have a LED which flashes to show writes. This is very useful to 
show when the delayed writes to usb have finished to avoid premature 
pulling out of the sticks and consequent corruption.


Tom Gilliard
satellit



Martin Langhoff wrote:
> (I am not sub'd to the soas list -- can a kind admin whitelist me?)
>
> Hi OLPC, SoaS folks,
>
> we have a deployment that wants to use SoaS for early teacher training
> before they have (enough) XOs in their hands.
>
> Besides the obvious indications that they pre-test the hw they'll run
> it on, and the "shut down SoaS carefully" recommendation, I drafted a
> plan for them to make Blueberry more like OLPC's F11:
>
>      - Take a XO (1 or 1.5) running the OLPC F11 image, get the
> package list with `rpm -qa | sort > todos-los-paquetes.lista`
>
>      - Get a box of USB sticks -- all same make, model & size.
>
>      - On one of the USB sticks, create a SoaS with a generous overlay.
>
>      - Start up SoaS on a machine with internet connection
>
>      - Get the package list on SoaS with the same command
>
>      - Compare the 2 lists, and on the SoaS side install anything that
> is missing (using yum)  Skip the kernel package.
>
>      - Restart the machine with SoaS to check that now you have the
> "swtich to gnome" option in the control panel, and the option to
> return to Sugar on the Gnome desktop. (Will this Just Work, or did we
> hardcode /home/olpc or the olpc uid?...)
>
>      - Once the SoaS works as expected, restart it, switch to a VT,
> and as the root user delete /home/liveuser/.sugar and then use the
> command  `halt` to shut down the system.
>
>      - Duplicate that exact SoaS disk using the dd command on any Linux machine
>
> Will this work? Is it easy to tell liveusb creator to add a few rpms...?
>
> cheers,
>
>
>
> m
>