Sugar on a Stick/Windows

Introduction

This page is designed to help you to put your Sugar on a Stick image on a thumbdrive using Microsoft Windows. If you have questions, trouble or feedback, please let us know on the SoaS talk page. If you can improve these instructions, please edit the page and do so!

with Microsoft Windows

There are three ways to do this:

• 1. Use Fedora Live USB Creator
  1. Download the Live USB Creator from FedoraHosted here.
  2. Insert a USB flash drive (or SD Card) with 1 GB or more of free space into your computer. (See LiveOS image and Cautions with using Live USB devices regarding flash drive size and usage.)
  3. Launch Live USB Creator.
  4. Select the 'Browse' button to 'Use existing Live CD' and find the downloaded .iso file image on your system.
  5. Adjust the Persistent Storage slider. This enables you to save changes to the system and additional Sugar Activities onto the device.
  6. Select your flash drive as the target, and click the Create Live USB button.
  7. Wait for the process to finish, then close the Live USB Creator program.
  8. Stop your flash drive with the Safely Remove Hardware and Eject Media notification area icon dialog, and eject it.

See a video of an earlier version of this process here.

Note: The above installation method does not allow the full optimization of data storage that comes from installing a separate, persistent home directory—see the alternate method just below.

• 2. Burn a CD-ROM disc, then run livecd-iso-to-disk
  1. Use Windows 7 built-in Disk Image Burner or a free utility, like ImgBurn, to write the downloaded SoaS .iso file onto a blank CD.
  2. Insert a USB flash drive (or SD Card) with 1 GB or more of free space into your computer. (See LiveOS image and Cautions with using Live USB devices regarding flash drive size and usage.)
  3. Boot your computer with the CD-ROM disc. You probably need to press F1, F10, F12, Esc, or a similar key as the computer starts up in order to set the boot source for your computer to the CD-ROM device.
  4. A successful boot will take you into Sugar on a Stick Mirabelle. From there, open the Terminal Activity, , from the Home view.
     
     See the Terminal Activity manual.
  5. Click the 'Become root' icon, , to gain administrative permissions in the Terminal session.
  6. Change the working directory to /LiveOS/
cd /LiveOS/
  7. Be certain of your USB/SD scsi drive node name (such as sda, sdb, etc.) and partition (such as 1, 2, etc.), yielding, for example, /dev/sdb1.

     Use the df -Th command to confirm your devices before executing the following script.

  8. execute the Linux command line:
     ./livecd-iso-to-disk --overlay-size-mb 300 --home-size-mb 200 --delete-home --unencrypted-home /dev/live /dev/sd?1
  9. Shutdown the physical machine.
  10. Reboot from the newly-installed Live USB with Mirabelle.

• 3. Launch a virtual machine, then run livecd-iso-to-disk
  1. Download and install VirtualBox (for example; you could do something similar with another vm).
  2. Create a new virtual machine, choose a name, such as Mirabelle.
  3. Choose Linux for the Operating System and Version Fedora (64 bit) if available, or Fedora, on systems lacking 64-bit functionality.
  4. Choose Base Memory Size: 256 MB to match an XO-1, 512 or 1024 MB to match an XO-1.5.
  5. Attach the SoaS-Mirabelle.iso file as a CD in the Storage Section
  6. Insert a USB storage device into your physical computer and enable the VirtualBox USB controller. Then add a filter to recognize the inserted device in the USB section of the VirtualBox machine setup.
  7. Start the new virtual machine.
  8. Verify that the USB device is recognized in the running virtual machine.
     • Your device appears in the hover box for the USB stick icon in the virtual machine bottom frame.
     • df -Th reveals your device mounted mounted on a device node, for example, /dev/sda1, on a filesystem volume mount point, such as /media/<USBdeviceManufacturer>

You should see something like the following:

[root@localhost LiveOS]# df -Th
Filesystem    Type    Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/live-rw
             ext4    4.0G  1.5G  2.5G  37% /
tmpfs        tmpfs    250M  236K  249M   1% /dev/shm
/dev/sr0   iso9660    477M  477M     0 100% /mnt/live
varcacheyum  tmpfs    250M     0  250M   0% /var/cache/yum
/tmp         tmpfs    250M   24K  249M   1% /tmp
vartmp       tmpfs    250M     0  250M   0% /var/tmp
/dev/sda1     vfat     15G  2.4G   13G  17% /media/TOSHIBA

9. Continue from step #4 in the Burn a CD-ROM disc section above.
10. Shutdown the virtual machine.
11. Reboot your physical computer from the newly-installed Live USB with Mirabelle.