[Server-devel] Best XSCE strategy for us in Pacific with XO-1.5 2GB Testing XSCE 3 on XO 1.5 2GB os855

[James Cameron]

G'day George,

On Tue, Jun 18, 2013 at 12:27:08PM -0400, George Hunt wrote:
> I followed the suggestions at http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Release_notes/10.1.0#
> External_SD -- substituting 31035o1.zd for the earlier OS64.
> 
> devalias fsdisk /sd/disk at 1:0
> fs-update u:\os64.zd

I've changed the instructions to read

    devalias fsdisk ext:0

because it is easier to type, and does the same thing.

> after the reboot, the "df" command indicated rootfs had a size of
> 60GB. I was able to write and read from the command line as olpc and
> as root. So I believe that indicates that 64GB drives do work on the
> XO-1.5. 

Yes, I agree it works on your XO-1.5.  It is now more likely that it
will work on other XO-1.5.

(Now scale it up to a statistically significant sample of 100 units of
XO-1.5 and 100 units of 64 GB SD card?  That's the advantage we had
when choosing what device to purchase for production, although we were
using 4 GB microSD cards.)

On Tue, Jun 18, 2013 at 02:58:50PM -0400, George Hunt wrote:
> This is probably a question for James C. I'm concerned that I may
> have invalidated the verification, or at least created misleading
> information.
> 
> My confession: I couldn't pass up the chance to evolve our
> "prep-storage.sh" script that is part of XSCE before I lost the
> exfat formatting. So I tweaked on our script until it recognized and
> dealt correctly with exfat format.  So when I did the "fs-update
> <os.zd>", the 64GB SD card was already formatted ext4.
> 
> Do you think that a separate formatting step is necessary, or
> irrelevant, to the success of fs-update?

Irrelevant.  fs-update using any of the OLPC OS .zd files will:

- destroy the partition table and create a new one,

- destroy any filesystem and create a new one.

It does this by treating the disk as a series of blocks, and writing
to them an image of a disk that was constructed by the release
engineer.

In your case, there may be remnant structure of your ext4 filesystem
that may be discovered by forensic analysis of the unwritten blocks on
the card.  But this will have no discernable impact on operation.

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