On Fri, Sep 11, 2009 at 12:00 PM, Art Hunkins <[email protected]> wrote: > With regard to Bill Bogstad's floppy boot disk project for SoaS: it works > flawlessly for me. (I've tried it successfully on both an older Windows > laptop and desktop - vintages: Pentium II/III.)
Thanks for the feedback! I wasn't aware that Walter was going to announce it this week so I quickly went and put a README.html file at the location he published so people would have some idea what to do with it. > I've one suggestion for Bill: for use by children, I'd make everything as > automatic as possible. Either delete the display where the user needs to > make a choice (it's *way* technical and *I* didn't know what to do), or put > a (10"?) auto-timer on it so that it goes on through (the usual way) without > user intervention. It's easy to put a timeout in or even eliminate the delay entirely. Because a floppy is easily writable (unlike a CD) you can even do it yourself. There is a text file called kexec-loader.conf on the floppy. You should be able to edit it with any text editor and change the line "timeout off" to have a number instead. It can be either 0 (boot immediately) or wait the specified number of seconds. If you look at the rest of the file you can get some idea of what is going on. It's probably a good time for me to point out that I didn't write the software. I just found it and worked with the author to fix some bugs/suggest features that made it work better for GPA. You can find more info about it at: www.solemnwarning.net/kexec-loader. The image I supplied is based on the authors most recent release 2.1.1. Speaking of GPA (who originally requested it), the 'wait for user input' is a good thing for their usage case.. They use a shared computer lab and wanted to be able to have an instructor go around the room inserting floppies and turning machines one before the students get there. (Booting from floppy is slow.) My understanding is that they plan to have students come in, insert their stick into an already powered up machine, hit enter, and then go over what they plan to do during that computer lab with the instructor. Other environments may want something different. Since floppies are writable changing timeouts and the menu text is straightforward. > For Windows people: I suggest creating the boot disk with RAWriteWin. It's > simple, user-friendly and efficient. Thanks for the info. I was hoping there was something other then rawrite.exe, but I hadn't researched it. Take care, Bill Bogstad _______________________________________________ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) [email protected] http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
