Sugar on a Stick/sdm

Goal

Enable autodetection of SoaS flash drives on SoaS-helper machines. (SoaS-helper was described in detail in this blog post)

Ideally, the Soas Desktop Manager should:

  • Start on boot when a -helper machine loads
  • Provide a helpful and simple user interface
  • Detect all versions of SoaS drives and update them if outdated
  • Handle failures gracefully
  • Prepare the system enviornment to allow the user to continue where they left off

Detection tools

Since we lack a better heuristic, we will attempt to use the following criteria for our definition of a SoaS disk:

  • The device is a removable media, such as SD, USB-flash, or MMC
  • The device is FAT formatted
  • The device contains a magic-file (to-be-determined) which identifies it as a SoaS disk

Unfortunately, this requires us to mount each candidate disk inserted into the computer, which slows reaction time.

Resources