[Server-devel] School Server installation report

[Tom Parker]

I'm trying to install the XS on my laptop as it resembles the hardware
we are taking to Samoa. The laptop is an HP Mini 311, an Atom N280 with
nvidia ion chipset and a broadcom wireless adapter which requires a
non-free driver. I'm installing on an SD card rather than the hard
drive.

I followed
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/XS_Techniques_and_Configuration#Installing_from_USB and succeeded in making the installation USB stick on an XO (this failed on my ubuntu desktop).

Installation on the 16GB SD card was difficult. I had to partition it
manually as it seems like the default layout won't fit. I couldn't see
the default layout as after telling me that there was no room for /boot,
it would reboot and I would have to enter everything again.

The SD card is very slow and I had to increase the sleep time
in /etc/init.d/ejabberd

I moved the wired ethernet port from eth0 to eth1 by
editing /etc/udev.d/70-persistent-net-rules manually. I looked at what
xs-swapnics did, and I think it would have done the same thing, but I
didn't run it since I don't want to swap the nics, I simply want to
ignore the WAN (the school will have no uplink).

I spent quite some time trying to create a dummy eth0 because things
didn't seem to be working, and that was the only thing that I'm missing.

I think the problems I had were:
* Registering when ejabberd wasn't working.
* Trying to log in to moodle without registering (you get a login prompt
and the instructions imply that you should be automatically logged in).
* One laptop wouldn't register until I did ctrl-alt-erase to restart
sugar. It had a temporary name resolution error in it's shell.log but
that has been overwritten.

I'm not sure that this older fedora is able to take advantage of my
laptop's power saving features -- the fan runs continuously (which is a
character flaw of this machine, but the XS causes more of it than
lucid).

Even for a linux expert, installing the XS was quite painful and took
several evenings of work.