Software tips, tricks, and hacks

This is an update modifying the original blog entry.

Today, I tried to create a bootable SD Card with SoaS for an Asus Eee PC.

Ultimately, I was successful. The sugarlabs Wiki has installation instructions. Following this instructions alone however, does not finish the job. Some additional work has to be done before after one can run the command (which is the essence of the wiki page just mentioned).

./livecd-iso-to-disk --reset-mbr --overlay-size-mb 500 --home-size-mb 900 --delete-home --unencrypted-home /run/initramfs/livedev /dev/sda1


sda1 might be something slightly different, like sdb1 or similar.

So let us start and do things one after the other.
After having started Fedora-Soas-Live in your VM program insert the SD card you want to use in the SD card reader of your machine. You might need to connect it to your VM.
To find the device you want to use
df -Th
You will recognize the SD card by the size displayed for all devices. Its name will be /dev/sda1 or something similar
This instruction will run a test and then tell you that the device is unmounted. So before you run this command a second time,


umount /dev/sda1


Try the lived-iso-to-disk command mentioned above again. You might be told the the partition is not boo table. You will get instructions how to start parted.


/sbin/parted /dev/sda


Once parted is started, enter the following commands


toggle 1 boot
quit


Then run the complete lived-iso-to-disk command once again and you will have a bootable removable storage device with SoaS.

Depending on the size of your SD card you might change some parameters. I used

./livecd-iso-to-disk --reset-mbr --overlay-size-mb 2000 --home-size-mb 2000 --delete-home --unencrypted-home /run/initramfs/livedev /dev/sda1


Additional remarks:
I was unable to use VirtualBox on my Mac, Virtualbox could not access the internal card reader, tip produced an error message when I tried to connect the SD card to the VM.

I also was unable to use VirtualBox with a multicardreader on Windows.

Parallels on the Mac worked, and a single slot USB card reader on my Windows machine worked.