CAUTION: XO booting is sensitive to filesystem corruption
by Mikus Grinbergs
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
15 years, 1 month
fewer activities in latest rawhide-xo
by Mikus Grinbergs
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
15 years, 1 month
Fwd: 2009-04-21 - Fedora Test Day - Minimal platform
by Peter Robinson
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
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15 years, 1 month
speak gets further
by Mikus Grinbergs
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
15 years, 1 month
XO becomes unresponsive
by Mikus Grinbergs
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
15 years, 1 month
[sugar-devel] Mounting SoaS images
by Luke Faraone
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
15 years, 1 month
Debugging booting problems with F9 on SD card...
by Martin Langhoff
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
15 years, 1 month
Re: [Sugar-devel] USB stick advice
by Caroline Meeks
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
>
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Caroline Meeks
Solution Grove
Caroline(a)SolutionGrove.com
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505-213-3268 - Fax
15 years, 1 month
