On Mon, Apr 27, 2009 at 5:17 PM, James Simmons <[email protected]>wrote:
> I tried using the latest snapshot with Smolt and have posted two > hardware profiles on the hardware page. Both are older computers that > cannot boot off a USB stick directly. I had first tried using the > latest boot CD and while this seemed to boot OK I had no network > access. I am assuming that this is because the OS on the CD is > different than the one on the stick. > > I was able to resolve this using a boot diskette. I can't find the > reference on the Wiki to this product, but it's a free as in beer > diskette that lets you choose what device to boot from even if the BIOS > doesn't support it. The problem with this diskette is that it will not > recognize USB ports that are not connected to the mother board > directly. So I can boot using the USB 1.1 ports on the front of my > computers but not the 2.0 ports on PCI cards in the back of the > computers. This was very slow but it did give me network access. Hi James, If you would could you put a link on the wiki and also a ticket to create a diskette version of a branded boot helper. Using a diskette rather then a CD will be a lot easier on a lot of the old computers because I often have to turn them on to open the CD holder, then turn them off and on again to reboot. > > > One thing I didn't realize was that Smolt requires you to have a stick > for each hardware profile you create. Once I figured this out I bought > more sticks and redid my profiles in the Wiki. > > The first stick let me create a hardware profile and send it to the > server, but Browse would not come up. I worked around this by saving > the Terminal buffer to the Journal using the clipboard, then reverting > the OS to the Beta while not overwriting home. I used the Beta to > create the Wiki table entry. Before reverting I tested the snapshot and > verified that networking and sound worked. I did not test Read Etexts > because without Browse working I was unable to download it. > > The second stick went better. Everything worked, and I was able to > download Read Etexts and View Slides and try them out. Read Etexts has > a text to speech function that I wanted to test, and as in previous > weeks the text highlighting lagged way behind the spoken words. This > doesn't happen on every computer, but it does happen on both of mine. > An HP Vectra at work does not have this problem. I want to add the > profile for this machine to the Wiki but we use a special configuration > script to set up a proxy server at work. I can do this for Mozilla on > Linux but I don't know how to make this work with Browse, etc. in > Sugar. If anyone has ideas I'd like to hear them. > > There is a fair amount of interest in TTS with highlighting even though > Read Etexts is the only Activity that supports it, and it might be > worthwhile to find out what the machines it works on have in common so > we can make the gstreamer espeak plugin work reliably everywhere. > > In addition to Browse not being able to launch on the first stick I > tried I had problems launching View Slides on the second stick. The > week before I couldn't launch Tam Tam Mini or Hablar Con Sara on the > Beta. These applications all work fine in my Fedora 10 Sugar test > environment. It seems to be a general flakiness with unpacking > Activities. I use 4 GB SanDisk Cruzer Micro sticks, a popular brand > sold at Costco. > > James Simmons > > _______________________________________________ > IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) > [email protected] > http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep > -- Caroline Meeks Solution Grove [email protected] 617-500-3488 - Office 505-213-3268 - Fax
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