olpc April 2009

olpc@lists.fedoraproject.org

26 participants
26 discussions

CAUTION: XO booting is sensitive to filesystem corruption
by Mikus Grinbergs 27 Apr '09

27 Apr '09

Been running rawhide-xo lately on my XOs. Have also installed q2e41.rom . Each XO has a "permanent" SD card. I was getting intermittent occasions when an XO would not boot -- soon after the screen background (as for "ok" prompt) changed from white to black, its boot process would hang with only a mysterious output message: " mount: unknown filesystem type 'jffs2' ". [If I repeated trying to boot, the hang would normally go away.] But today after I had used 'copy-nand' to replace 20090416.img on an XO with with 20090426.img, the hang (with that strange message) kept repeating. By juggling external USB devices [my usual "fix" for XO booting problems] I finally got that XO booted - but happened to run into a problem trying to delete some files from the SD card on that XO. Googled for help - and found that 'fsck' was suggested. Ran 'fsck' against the filesystem on the SD card [it found a number of bad references involving the files I was trying to delete]. And now that XO boots without hanging !!! My guess is that the problem with the (ext2) filesystem on the SD card somehow triggered whatever led to that strange output message which mentioned 'jffs2'. mikus

1 0

fewer activities in latest rawhide-xo
by Mikus Grinbergs 26 Apr '09

26 Apr '09

Noticed that ~cjb/rawhide-xo build 20090426.img did not define any directory /home/liveuser/Activities. It also left out the "honey" group of Activities from SugarLabs. mikus

1 0

Announcing Fedora 11 Beta for XO
by Chris Ball 25 Apr '09

25 Apr '09

Hi, Here's a build of the F11 beta release for XO: http://dev.laptop.org/~cjb/rawhide-xo/f11-beta/ Instructions on flashing are at http://dev.laptop.org/~cjb/rawhide-xo/. Enjoy, - Chris, with thanks to the SoaS and Fedora teams. -- Chris Ball <cjb(a)laptop.org>

9 21

Fwd: 2009-04-21 - Fedora Test Day - Minimal platform
by Peter Robinson 20 Apr '09

20 Apr '09

Hi All, Sorry for the cross post from fedora-devel but this might be of interest to some of the olpc people. This is something I've been concentrating on for a while, as I know have others so if you can free a little bit of time for some testing that would be great. Cheers, Peter Greetings testers, Calling all package gurus and dependency junkies! The Fedora 11 MinimalPlatform feature [1] aims to provide a tiny installation package set by identifying unwanted deps from @Core and related groups. As described in the feature page, the benefits to Fedora include: * Security - lower the attack surface by installing only necessary packages * Performance - faster installation and less running services * Storage - installation is less than 500MB There will also be several new tools available to help navigate dependencies, including rpmreaper and rpm2comps. Come join #fedora-qa this Tuesday, April 21 2009 to help put an end to deps creep. Test cases and a Fedora live image will be available to aid testing. Stay tuned for more details are available at https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Test_Day:2009-04-21_Minimal_Platform. Thanks, James [1] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/MinimalPlatform -- fedora-test-list mailing list fedora-test-list(a)redhat.com To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-test-list

1 0

speak gets further
by Mikus Grinbergs 19 Apr '09

19 Apr '09

Disclaimer: I am not asking for help. I'm posting my experience, in case anyone noticed that the 'Speak' activity (distributed as part of honey) used to not launch on F11-on-XO. After manually upgrading to 'pygame-1.8.1-5' (plus dependencies), my (rawhide-xo .img) XO now launches 'Speak', though the "general" audio problem with F11-on-XO prevents me from hearing anything. mikus

1 0

XO becomes unresponsive
by Mikus Grinbergs 19 Apr '09

19 Apr '09

Disclaimer: I am not asking for help - I can just reboot and continue with my work. This information is posted so that if anyone else runs into a similar situation, they might realize that they are not alone in seeing it. [I have not tried to create this situation deliberately, so I do not know how repeatable it is.] Running ~cjb/fedora-xo/20090416.img (installed via 'copy-nand'). This is a heavily customized system, using a swap partition on an SD card. [It also has an USB hub, with USB devices plugged into that.] Was running a 'find' command (in Terminal) against the principal partition of the SD card. Noticed that the XO became unresponsive. Went to the text console (ctl-alt-F2) and tried to log in. That, too, didn't go - because the XO never completed the login. In the meantime, every four or so seconds (i.e., periodically) the following group of 9 text lines was being output on the text console olpc-ec: running cmd 0x15 olpc-ec: received 0x33 olpc-ec: running cmd 0x15 olpc-ec: received 0x33 olpc-ec: running cmd 0x15 olpc-ec: received 0x33 olpc-ec: running cmd 0x10 olpc-ec: received 0x55 olpc-ec: received 0x2a The last of those lines kept changing from group to group. I saw values of 0x30,0x2e, 0x32, 0x28, 0x26, 0x34, 0x34, 0x2e, 0x32, 0x2a, 0x2c, 0x2e, ox28, etc., etc. in that last line. None of this meant anything to me - as I said, I just rebooted. Note: I typically experience unresponsiveness on F11-on-XO sooner or later (often during a 'find' [which I use heavily]). The unresponsiveness seems to come on sooner with Soas2 run from an USB stick - then I do not have a swap partition "active". mikus

2 1

[sugar-devel] Mounting SoaS images
by Luke Faraone 18 Apr '09

18 Apr '09

This isn't really sugar specific, and Tomeu suggested that this might be more apropos for this list. ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Luke Faraone <luke(a)faraone.cc> Date: Sat, Apr 18, 2009 at 3:02 PM Subject: Mounting SoaS images To: Sugar Devel <sugar-devel(a)lists.sugarlabs.org> Hi, I'm currently trying to develop SDM<http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_on_a_Stick/sdm>, a utility which will run on school lab computers and automaticaly detect when USB flash drives with SoaS are plugged in. The idea is that in a lab we don't want to have to fiddle with the BIOS, and want something like what the boothelper is doing but on the computers themselves. Basically, we'd have a local copy of Fedora on the lab computers and would simply use the /home directories on the SoaS sticks. In order to do that, we need to mount the filesystem created by liveUSB (which contains /home). LiveUSB used and still uses persistant LVM overlays/snapshots, and based on my current understanding it is very difficult to mount a LVM snapshot outside of the host system. The LiveUSB script has an option to create a normal home.img file, but this option is not exposed in the Windows GUI. The end result is that unless this option is used, the home dirtectory is inaccessable to SDM. Is there something we can do to fix this, or am I missing something about how LVM works? -- Luke Faraone http://luke.faraone.cc -- Luke Faraone http://luke.faraone.cc

1 0

Announcing Sugar on a Stick Beta 1
by Sebastian Dziallas 17 Apr '09

17 Apr '09

Hi everybody, The SoaS team is happy to announce the availability of our Beta-1 Release today! There has been impressive progress over the last few weeks; many thanks all the people who contributed their time and effort. The images have been composed and are up and ready for download. A direct link to the Beta-1 image: http://download.sugarlabs.org/soas/releases/soas-beta.iso The release notes: http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_on_a_Stick/Beta Instructions on how to put the image onto a USB key: http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_on_a_Stick PLEASE NOTE: This is a beta release, which means that it will have bugs. But we need your help to test it. Please give it a try and report back any problems you encounter. General feedback is also most welcome. Please direct it to our IAEP list: iaep(a)lists.sugarlabs.org Thanks again and happy testing!

1 0

Debugging booting problems with F9 on SD card...
by Martin Langhoff 15 Apr '09

15 Apr '09

On the mission of getting a XS image running on the XO, I have abused imagecreator (part of livecdtools) to create an ext3 image based on the XS ISO we distribute. Now I am trying to make the image boot on the XO, and it is not working. It fails in trying to mount (and then switchroot to) /dev/root. I suspect that it's the initrd mount process that is failing there, but I am a bit at a loss on where to focus my debugging next. OFW appears to read the initrd alright, and yet... - The whole image is i686 (while trying to convince imagecreator to set the arch to i586) so that may be a source of problems. - The resulting ext3 image is using vanilla F9 kernel 2.6.27.19-78.2.30.fc9.686 -- no olpc-specific kernels here. From what I understand, all the fixes applied to F10 initrds have also been applied to recent F9 kernels. - I've created vmlinuz / initrd symlinks to make things easier -- at least during debugging. Does anything in the kernel rpm %post set those up or update them if they're found? Or update olpc.fth? Either way, everytime a new kernel is installed I need to update *something*... - I have also set /etc/fstab to mount /dev/mmcblk0p1 as / - My olpc.fth is built thus: cat > /boot/olpc.fth << EOF \ Boot script " ro root=/dev/mmcblk0p1 rootfstype=ext3 rootdelay=5 console=ttyS0,115200 console=tty0 fbcon=font:SUN12x22" to boot-file " sd:\boot\initrd" to ramdisk " sd:\boot\vmlinuz" to boot-device unfreeze boot EOF - Funny enough, unfreeze doesn't seem to work, and the boot fails while consistently showing a pretty screen. Hints welcome... cheers, m -- martin.langhoff(a)gmail.com martin(a)laptop.org -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff

6 18

Re: [Sugar-devel] USB stick advice
by Caroline Meeks 14 Apr '09

14 Apr '09

On Tue, Apr 14, 2009 at 4:16 AM, Tomeu Vizoso <tomeu(a)sugarlabs.org> wrote: > [cc'ing fedora-olpc because we are using unmodified fedora tools] > > On Mon, Apr 13, 2009 at 23:33, Walter Bender <walter.bender(a)gmail.com> > wrote: > > Thanks. This is all helpful. I wonder what the Fedora USB Creator does > > when it runs under Windows? > > AFAIK, what Mitch says is what we currently do when using both > livecd-iso-to-disk.sh and the Fedora Live USB creator. > > For flashing a big number of sticks with a port replicator, we could > first use livecd-iso-to-disk.sh to copy the partition files to one > stick and set the bootable flag, then use dd to read into an image and > then dd again to write it to the rest of the sticks, provided they are > actually identical inside. > I don't think they are actually identical inside. They show up as all different sizes. I used dd to make an image then zcat to write it to new sticks. zcat ./SoaS-Beta-4-9.img.Z > /dev/disk2 I got a fairly high failure rate so I'm not saying this is a good method. > > Regards, > > Tomeu > > > -walter > > > > On Mon, Apr 13, 2009 at 3:53 PM, Mitch Bradley <wmb(a)laptop.org> wrote: > >> My first order recommendation is "don't use dd to blast an image over > the > >> existing partition map". > >> > >> The problem with doing so is that it wrecks the factory partition > layout. I > >> strongly suspect that said factory layout is, on many sticks, optimized > for > >> the characteristics of the stick's internal firmware and the hardware > block > >> sizes of the NAND Flash chips. > >> > >> Unfortunately, the alternative is rather more complicated procedurally > than > >> "dd and pray". But given the indifferent results from dd&pray, I think > it > >> may be worthwhile to go for a more elaborate procedure. > >> > >> Here is an outline of what I think really should be done: > >> > >> a) Ensure that your filesystem image is somewhat smaller than 1G (or 2G > or > >> whatever your base size) so it will fit on "all" 1G devices. > >> > >> b) The image is just the partition contents, excluding the partition > block > >> and master boot record. > >> > >> c) The installation procedure involves > >> > >> c1) Editing (not replacing) the existing partition map, setting the > first > >> partition's "boot flag" byte and changing its filesystem type to ext2 or > >> whatever. (Ideally it would better not to change the filesystem type, > >> instead sticking with the factory FAT partition, but I understand what a > >> hard nut that is to swallow for Linux enthusiasts.) > >> > >> c2) Copying the image into the partition > >> > >> c3) Installing your bootloader using an installation program instead of > dd, > >> thus replacing the first sector's Master Boot Record and doing whatever > else > >> is necessary to complete the bootloader's installation. I have had the > best > >> results with syslinux. > >> > >> There is, of course, a chicken-and-egg problem of how do you run the > >> bootloader's installer. On the other hand, you have the same problem > with > >> "dd" - in principle, on any machine that can run "dd", you can also run > >> syslinux. > >> > >> If you want to talk more about this issue, please feel free to keep the > >> conversation going. It is a topic that has been much on mind recently. > >> > >> Mitch > >> > >> > >> > >> Walter Bender wrote: > >>> > >>> I was wondering if you have any words of wisdom to share with us re > >>> USB stick compatibility, given your experience with the XO. There > >>> seems to be a lot of variability in terms of which sticks boot which > >>> machines in our Sugar-on-a-Stick experiments, e.g., using the same > >>> machine (a Classmate running XP) to burn the same image (the Beta SoaS > >>> iso) onto USB storage media from three different vendors, I cannot > >>> predict which one(s) will be bootable on any particular piece of > >>> hardware. Is there any deterministic way to proceed, or is trail and > >>> error our only recourse? > >>> > >>> thanks. > >>> > >>> -walter > >>> > >>> > >> > > > > > > > > -- > > Walter Bender > > Sugar Labs > > http://www.sugarlabs.org > > _______________________________________________ > > Sugar-devel mailing list > > Sugar-devel(a)lists.sugarlabs.org > > http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel > > > _______________________________________________ > Sugar-devel mailing list > Sugar-devel(a)lists.sugarlabs.org > http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel > -- Caroline Meeks Solution Grove Caroline(a)SolutionGrove.com 617-500-3488 - Office 505-213-3268 - Fax

1 0

2024

2023

2022

2021

2020

2019

2018

2017

2016

2015

2014

2013

2012

2011

2010

2009

2008

olpc April 2009