evaluating Sugar in the developed world

How teachers in the developed world can run the Sugar software and activities in our computer labs which run only Windows!!

Problem: Shortage of OLPC machines in the developed world, ie. you need to be able to play with it, immerse yourself in it in order to be able to evaluate it. That's how computer learning works.

Educational objective: I will get my year 10 IT class to systematically evaluate the Sugar software and activities

Summary: Make a bootable USB key of the XO-LiveCD image and setup the BIOS on each computer to boot off the USB key

Details:

1. Download the bleeding edge joyride version of the XO-LiveCD, currently XO-LiveCD_080607.iso
2. Burn an image CD
3. (It's not practical for me to use the CDs at school since the CD drives have not been enabled due to student vandalism in the past)
4. download unetbootin-windows-241.exe from http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/
5. format your usb drive under windows (or delete all the files of it if already in windows format)
6. run the downloaded file unetbootin-windows-241.exe
7. it should find your usb drive
8. click on the diskimage radiobutton
9. browse to your XO -live CD iso (must have it in iso format - cant use a burnt cd)
10. click on OK
11. wait till files are copied (it takes a while)
12. go into BIOS and setup to boot of USB-HDD key
13. reboot off USB Drive

Update:(7th August)
With the above there is a problem that the USB key does not boot into the introductory menu seen on the bootable CD, which enables you to select the bleeding edge joyride version and choose your language. It boots into the default German language standard version of Sugar.

To fix this problem:

1. Open the syslinux.cfg file (on the USB key) in notepad or some other editor
2. Change lb_country=6 to lb_country=1 (German to English)
3. Change lb_config=update.1 to lb_config=joyride
4. Change lb_system=build-708 to lb_system=joyride-2024
5. Save and reboot
   

A one gig usb drive is the minimum requirement because the joyride CD is 700 mb

Thanks to tony, joel and paul for help with this