Talk:Installing an activity pack

Why it's separate

Don't merge with Activity pack. I think mstone made this separate so it can be transcluded into other pages—until a week ago the same set of instructions appeared in lots of different pages. Transclusion makes sense to me. -- Skierpage 03:16, 26 May 2008 (EDT)

It also makes sense to have such things on shorter, individual pages that cover one topic well. --76.15.106.184 20:00, 23 September 2008 (UTC)

Installing under an emulator?

How about instructions for qemu users? pengo 23:12, 24 June 2008 (UTC)

FLash Drive

Does the flash drive have to be empty save for this package?

A: No.Yes. see below.

Instructions don't work for secure machines?

I have a secure machine (haven't gotten a developer key yet), but I still had to hold the X game button to get the activities to load. However, I didn't want to change the "official" instructions yet, as it may be something I'm doing that's abnormal. -- User:Peterm, 3 August 2008

Interesting. I too found activities wouldn't load from USB flash drive when I upgraded my secure (no developer key) machine from Ship.1 (build 650) to 8.1.0 ("Update.1", build 703). I never tried holding down the X button. -- Skierpage 03:06, 4 August 2008 (UTC)

I tried installing 703 with a usb key with a bunch of other stuff on it, and that's when I had to use the X game button to get the activities to load. In fact, only Terminal, Log Viewer and Analyze worked properly, nothing else would start. I re-did the entire upgrade (OS and Aps) with a blank, vfat formatted usb key and now it appears to be working fine.

I suggest the pages be merged. The instructions on this page did not install the activities automatically, although I could run them from the flash drive. I had previously installed 703. A definition of "secure machine" for us mortals would help too...mine's a G1G1, is that secure or insecure? I tried holding the X game key too, that also failed. When I found Bert's script on the other page everything installed perfectly. So I think thatpage is more useful, although it could be a bit clearer for us neophytes.

Critical USB formatting--please clarify

I discovered a critical factor in a successful activity pack update, and it was not at all clear from the documentation. Please update the page to make this clear, so folks like me don't waste hours in frustration.

The documentation states that you should format your memory stick as FAT16 with long filename support. I put my 4Gb memory stick into my currently-patched Windows XP machine, and selected "Format drive". It brought up a dialog box, with "FAT32" as the format type. This is the only choice there was, so I assumed that it must be right. Formatted, downloaded per instructions, plugged it into the XO and followed the directions. Got a lot of text, something called a "kernel panic" (that doesn't seem like a Good Thing!?) and then it spewed some more error messages later. I tried it several times, on two different XOs, and neither one worked. Finally gave up around 5am to get a few hours sleep before work.

Tried some more this evening, still no go. Tried various combinations of files in the root directory, directories with no files in the root, etc. Nothing. Pulled out another memory stick to see if it was hardware. This one's only 1Gb, and when I went to format it ***I HAD TWO FORMAT CHOICES***. And one of 'em was FAT. I don't know if that's "FAT with long filename support", but it's one more choice than I had before. So I chose that, loaded up again per instructions, fired up the XO and THIS TIME IT WORKED!!!

Please....for the benefit of us unwashed masses who "just want it to work"....describe in exhaustive detail exactly how the USB stick should be formatted, and what limits there are, if any, so far as size of the USB stick goes. Further, please re-word the language regarding file organization to make it clear exactly what sort of file structure is expected. From the wording, I don't know if you meant that I should manually extract all the files and then transfer them to the root directory, or whether they were ok to live in the directories that they were extracted to when they unzipped onto the USB stick. The text makes reference to a structure which does not look the same as what comes out on the USB stick.

Note that this same 4Gb memory stick, formatted as FAT32, was previously used to do the operating system update using olpc-update --usb...and THAT worked just fine. Why it would work *there*, and then *not work* when I went to install the activity packs, is a question I'll leave to people who actually understand software. Me, I just want it to work.

MGF 09 September 08