I’m having a bit of trouble accessing a flash drive in the Dexter OS. You would think a flash drive would be hot swappable given it is USB, but that has not been my experience.
I had my GoPiGo running and decided to save a program I had written in Bloxter so I plugged in the flash drive. When I did so the flash drive option was grayed out. I finally rebooted the GoPiGo, leaving the flash drive plugged in, and when I did that the Dexter OS picked up the drive. Odd thing is that it seems to need to be plugged in at boot up.
An update as I kept tinkering with this after the previous post.
I can get the GoPiGo to read a freshly inserted flash drive; however, it took a bit of clicking around to do so. The first time I was in the open file dialog the USB button was active, but it then grayed out. Then I had to cancel and try again a couple of times to get the contents of the flash drive to show up when clicking on the USB button.
The more I study on this I wonder if the capacity of my flash drive is a factor. The only one I happen to have on hand right now is 16 GB, which might take a computer like the Pi a little time to read. Maybe I’m being impatient. I would try a smaller drive if I had one on hand. Might be something to pay attention to if you try to repeat this for yourself.
Sorry if it seems the Flash drive is a bit of a mystery. As you experienced it, it is not hot swappable . We highly recommend always booting up with a USB stick in place. We save logs on that stick too, should you ever find you need some support.
We did put a system in place that is a bit of a compromise. DexterOS will discover a USB stick within a minute. It doesn’t matter what you do, every minute it will check whether a USB stick is active or not. If you find you booted up without a stick and then want to save to one, just wait a minute before calling the save window.
This is something we may revisit in the future, based on user feedback. In the meantime, always booting with a stick is your best bet.
Thanks. This is good to know. I was, of course, approaching this based on my experience when I plug a flash drive into a unit running the Mac OS, Windows, Ubuntu, etc.