Announcing Q3C05 for XO-1.5

[James Cameron]

On Thu, Apr 12, 2012 at 03:10:16PM +1000, Sridhar Dhanapalan wrote:
> On 9 April 2012 13:25, James Cameron <quozl at laptop.org> wrote:
> > - add new fs-save command [1] for preparing an image copy of internal
> > ?storage,
> >
> > [1] ?http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OLPC_Firmware_q4d09/fs-save
> 
> How useful is this for a layperson to clone an XO's setup across a
> school/classroom?

Not useful.  The layperson would require training in
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Ok and use of USB drives, and then once the
image is obtained they would need to be shown how to run zhashfs in
olpc-os-builder.

We do not have a program available at the moment for the reverse of
fs-copy, that is, reading an image from USB drive and writing it to internal
storage.  It would take about 15 minutes to run, as opposed to the usual
5 minutes for fs-update.

This would not be a difficult program to write, estimated four hours
effort.  But I don't think we have a need for it at the moment, and our
deployment support team does not wish to encourage imaging.  I'd have to
get some buy-in.

Both steps could be wrapped in a boot script to avoid typing by the
layperson.

> Is this a replacement for http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Imaging_for_XO-1.5 ?

No, not entirely.  It is a slow replacement for the "Capture Internal
microSD" step
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Imaging_for_XO-1.5#Capture_Internal_microSD

> Do we still need to manually mitigate the side effects?
> http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Imaging/Side_effects

Yes.

Jerry could also write a startup script that does these actions if the
serial number changes since last boot.  But that would have an
unpleasant side-effect of losing all saved data if either (a) the serial
number can't be read, or (b) the internal microSD card is moved to
another unit as part of a repair.  Making /home/olpc a symlink to
/home/$SERIAL_NUMBER might be useful.

-- 
James Cameron
http://quozl.linux.org.au/