Cheers

@Mel: Actually, I put a letter for the parents in the envelope I handed out. There were some explanations about what the stick and CD does (does not write to the hard disk) and a step-by-step guide how to start it. I added as well a few words what could go wrong: “It boots Windows/Mac and not Sugar from the stick”. I think the problem is, that there are not really that many error messages. It just boots Sugar or boots the OS on the hard drive. And each machine is different, has another key to get into the bios, another key reveal a boot option list… Let’s see what they report back

And how do you give good instructions to a young learner to make settings in the BIOS?

I wonder it it might help to send them home with pieces of paper with a bug report template specifically for this - so they can identify and mark at what stage in the boot process things stop at (if they don’t work) and what error messages are showing.

BTW I found a new lead on how to make it easier to use the sticks.

linuxliveusb creates a stick with both a bootable image and a portable version of virtual box that works on Windows. They said they would put Strawberry and Blueberry in the next version.

Let’s make sure we get this into the official docs for SoaS v3 or so, too.

This is my output - so in yours it caught an error in line 61 of the script. Not sure what the error is really about.

# sh boot-helper-creator.sh soas-2-blueberry.iso
I: -input-charset not specified, using utf-8 (detected in locale settings)
Size of boot image is 4 sectors -> No emulation
70.09% done, estimate finish Tue Dec 8 09:04:36 2009
Total translation table size: 2048
Total rockridge attributes bytes: 0
Total directory bytes: 0
Path table size(bytes): 10
Max brk space used 0
7147 extents written (13 MB)
Done.

The script creates a file in the same directory:
-rw-r–r–. 1 root root 14637056 8. Dec 09:07 soas-boot.iso

You can download the boot helper for the blueberry release as well directly: http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_on_a_Stick/Blueberry#Helper_CD

About the collaboration, you first need to see if it is link local communication or using a jabber server. You can check that in the control panel. Best is to have a look into the logs then (log activity) and check the presence service log and either the one from salut (link local) or gabble (server based). More info on how to get logs: http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/BugSquad/Get_Logs

I snagged the script you linked to and ran it against the live ISO. This happened:

root@ngraytha:/home/robotech# sh boot-helper-creator.sh soas-2-blueberry.iso
I: -input-charset not specified, using utf-8 (detected in locale settings)
Size of boot image is 4 sectors -> No emulation
70.09% done, estimate finish Mon Dec 7 19:54:10 2009
Total translation table size: 2048
Total rockridge attributes bytes: 0
Total directory bytes: 392
Path table size(bytes): 10
Max brk space used 0
7147 extents written (13 MB)
trap: 61: SIGINT: bad trap

What does all that mean? Did the ISO get made properly or did it error out?

mir ist gerade aufgefallen, das der verheiratete Herr Dr. Schampijer noch nie in seinem Leben gebloggt hat. …