Today at the OLPC Learning Club DC meeting, we're learning Sugar on a Stick by creating liveUSB's and throwing Sugar on a number of netbooks.
Our first impression: Its FAST!
Timing the boot sequence for Sugar on a HP Mini Note, we clock a blazing fast 57 seconds from choosing Sugar to the Activities screen.
I wonder how much of that is just Atom vs. Geode or some level of optimization inherent in Sugar on a Stick?
Sugar USB Creator is Touchy
We had a 50% success rate with our efforts on making Sugar on a Stick using the Fedora LiveUSB creator and the Sugar ISO. No clue if that's a fault of all our multi-taking during creation or the messy variants of USB sticks we were working with.
Not Everything Works
Often, the cursor was missing on startup and various Activities didn't work - Speak, Scratch, and Browse. The latter is hampered by the inability of Sugar on a Stick to connect to any WiFi networks. Maybe that's encryption or drivers, but its annoying.
Sugar on a Stick is shocking
Overall Impression: Woohoo!
Its great to see Sugar leaping from the XO onto other hardware platforms. We tried the HP Mini Note, Aspire One, Samsung MC10, and a full-sized Dell Notebook, the last one converted from Windows Vista to the joy of its owner.
Or as several kids told their parents, "Dad, I'm putting Sugar on a Stick on your computer!"
Did anyone try running SOaS plugged into an XO USB port?
SoaS does not work (yet) on the XO.
The XO has a different BIOS based on Open Firmware and needs a small Forth file in the boot partition.
SoaS on a USB stick is in fact a read-only copy of the CD-ROM images (the iso file for the live-cd) and an overlay which stores all the changes and user files.
Do not know if the Linux kernel on the XO supports the iso9660 filesystem (= the one used on a CD).
I guess if you consider 57 seconds blazing fast. Windows XP or GNU/Linux(Cruncheee or Xandros) boots in 30 seconds on my Eee 701.
@John Smith:
"Windows XP or GNU/Linux(Cruncheee or Xandros) boots in 30 seconds on my Eee 701."
You mean you were able to boot Windows XP from a USB stick?
;-)
Sure:
http://forum.eeeuser.com/viewtopic.php?id=21002
http://forums.ngine.de/viewforum.php?f=4
@John Smith:
These are 1" HDD. I meant USB flash memory, SDD.
The point is that I understood the desktop version of XP cannot run from Read-Only memory. Only the embedded version of XP can.
And I heard you should run any OS-on-Flash on a RO basis (see my earlier comment):
http://www.olpcnews.com/people/negroponte/want_dual-boot_sugar_xp_laptop.html#comment-268859
However, MS seems to be working hard to get XP on flash memory for the XO. So they will get either XP embedded, Win7, or a rebranded XP embeded working safely directly on flash some day.
Winter
I thought you meant the possibility of it booting from a USB drive at all. As many people in the posts have stated it will run on USB flash as well, since the hardware appears as a generic drive (using a standard MSC driver) and hides all the unnecessary details about how the hardware works (including wear leveling)
I have WinXP working on an internal flash SSD. No problems. And this is a relatively cheap SSD, after all it is in a cheap computer
WinXP will also work on RO memory. Look up bartPE. Alternatively you can just drop in the EWF driver from embedded and it will work from standard XP on a standard drive. No writes at all except if you want!
If you're worried about flash endurance, I challenge you to take a $10 Kingston flash drive and overwrite it in any method you see fit, and wear it out... get back to me in 10 years or so.
@John Smith:
"If you're worried about flash endurance, I challenge you to take a $10 Kingston flash drive and overwrite it in any method you see fit, and wear it out... get back to me in 10 years or so."
I seriously hope you are right. The alternative would be an disaster waiting to happen.
I still remember the pain that resulted from failing floppies. I have seen a lot of work going down the drain because the floppies (or tapes) suddenly proved to be garbled. The same with "securely" backed up data on CD/DVD-R.
Winter
How about 5 seconds boot; http://lwn.net/Articles/299483/
Of the 5, 2 seconds are for the desktop (KDE?), so maybe Sugar would reach 3 seconds on an AsusEEE at least?
Since Sugar runs linux 2.6, probably powerTOP and bootchart are available? That's a place to start looking.
Dude, you are a dumbass - you aren't very good at puzzles because you don't understand the concept of the game!!! You can't click on the empty cell, because you have a choice of two tiles to move, which affects how the rest of the game is played.