It's a well-known fact in our circles that third-party USB conversion tools (like UNetbootin or Universal USB Installer) can't create Fedora Live USB correctly. Unfortunately, it is not well known among our users (I see it very often on test list, IRC, or local fedora.cz website/forums) and even journalists. This is an article that was published yesterday showcasing difficulties of Fedora installation process (translated from Czech by google translate):
https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&prev=_...
The purpose of that article is to highlight the fact that Linux has made a lot of progress in the last years, but the results are still a bit like a Russian roulette. Fedora, in this case, is shown as the negative example. The website itself is not known for high quality articles here in CZ, but they are quite popular and have a large reader base. They are mainly Windows-focused, but with the recent advancement of Linux on all fronts (mainly in gaming), they're clearly willing to provide more Linux coverage - and they picked Fedora as their second option right after Ubuntu, which is great. Provided they're able to install it in the first place...
The result of Live USB boot attempt is often this (from the article): http://www.zive.cz/uploadedfiles/38598240.png
I wonder, is there something we can do to improve the situation? * We have no control over third-party USB conversion tools. * Even if we file bug reports, they are often ignored (Adam Williamson said he tried to communicate with UNetbootin, unsuccessfully). * Third-party USB installers fail for many distributions, like OpenSUSE http://en.opensuse.org/SDB:Live_USB_stick or Arch https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/USB_Flash_Installation_Media#Using_UNetbootin. * Still, they are hugely popular, because Ubuntu and its derivatives dominate the market and those tools usually work fine for them. * The users simply don't know that those tools shouldn't be used, and some others should be used instead.
I don't known the technical details about USB conversion process, but maybe we could collectively think of some changes that would improve the current state at least a bit?
Some ideas: 1. First and foremost, we should obviously consider whether we can make some compose changes that would make the image more compatible with third-party USB installers. That's very technical, but I hope relevant people could provide some comments here.
2. Second, we could make USB conversion instructions more visible on our pages. If you look at http://fedoraproject.org/, there's a big Download Now! button, which gives you the ISO, but you'll never encounter any suggestions what to do with it. That's only available at http://fedoraproject.org/en/get-fedora#desktops in the right column (which is nice and quite visible, I think). Could we provide the same information on the front page?
3. Third, if everything goes wrong and you end up in a dracut shell, could we at least advise our users what went wrong and what to do with it? Because the current output is very scary and very hard to decipher by a general user: http://www.zive.cz/uploadedfiles/38598240.png So what if we detected that we failed to find a partition having "Fedora-Live" in its name (thus most probably an incorrectly created LiveUSB), and in that case printed out something like this?
******************************************************************************* * It seems Fedora Live image could not have been accessed. This often happens * * when Live USB media is incorrectly created by a third-party USB installer. * * Please refer to official documentation on fedoraproject.org for proper * * instructions. * ******************************************************************************* (native speakers will surely make it sound better)
This would help our users a lot to understand what's wrong and how to fix it. Also, it would be much easier to google out the problem. If we included the same text on our LiveUSB instructions page https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/How_to_create_and_use_Live_USB, it could receive a very good position in online search results.
So, what do you think? From my experience, the inability to boot USB is very common and I'd even say it's one of the major problems why new users walk away from Fedora. Because, understand, they don't even know something is wrong on their end. That scary dracut error looks like a problem in Fedora, and therefore often their conclusion is "Fedora is so broken it can't even boot". If we try to mitigate the problem at least with clear explanations, we will not only discourage less users, but also decrease the number of negative reviews by journalists.
On Thu, Jul 31, 2014 at 05:04:16AM -0400, Kamil Paral wrote:
Some ideas:
- First and foremost, we should obviously consider whether we can make some compose changes that would make the image more compatible with third-party USB installers. That's very technical, but I hope relevant people could provide some comments here.
I suppose we could install a dracut module for the live initrd that assumes live by default instead of depending on the rd.live.image argument. But that won't help much when they totally mangle the cmdline or the iso label.
- Second, we could make USB conversion instructions more visible on our pages. If you look at http://fedoraproject.org/, there's a big Download Now! button, which gives you the ISO, but you'll never encounter any suggestions what to do with it. That's only available at http://fedoraproject.org/en/get-fedora#desktops in the right column (which is nice and quite visible, I think). Could we provide the same information on the front page?
I think this is the one that has the best chance for success. We need to clearly direct people to the usb creation instructions, encourage use of dd on linux/osx systems and liveusb-creator on Windows.
- Third, if everything goes wrong and you end up in a dracut shell, could we at least advise our users what went wrong and what to do with it? Because the current output is very scary and very hard to decipher by a general user:
http://www.zive.cz/uploadedfiles/38598240.png So what if we detected that we failed to find a partition having "Fedora-Live" in its name (thus most probably an incorrectly created LiveUSB), and in that case printed out something like this?
- It seems Fedora Live image could not have been accessed. This often happens *
- when Live USB media is incorrectly created by a third-party USB installer. *
- Please refer to official documentation on fedoraproject.org for proper *
- instructions. *
(native speakers will surely make it sound better)
We might be able to do this along with a module that assumes live instead of normal boot.
Longer term, would turning this "stateless" via new systemd features be helpful?.
On 31 July 2014 18:13, Brian C. Lane bcl@redhat.com wrote:
On Thu, Jul 31, 2014 at 05:04:16AM -0400, Kamil Paral wrote:
Some ideas:
- First and foremost, we should obviously consider whether we can make some compose changes that would make the image more compatible with third-party USB installers. That's very technical, but I hope relevant people could provide some comments here.
I suppose we could install a dracut module for the live initrd that assumes live by default instead of depending on the rd.live.image argument. But that won't help much when they totally mangle the cmdline or the iso label.
- Second, we could make USB conversion instructions more visible on our pages. If you look at http://fedoraproject.org/, there's a big Download Now! button, which gives you the ISO, but you'll never encounter any suggestions what to do with it. That's only available at http://fedoraproject.org/en/get-fedora#desktops in the right column (which is nice and quite visible, I think). Could we provide the same information on the front page?
I think this is the one that has the best chance for success. We need to clearly direct people to the usb creation instructions, encourage use of dd on linux/osx systems and liveusb-creator on Windows.
- Third, if everything goes wrong and you end up in a dracut shell, could we at least advise our users what went wrong and what to do with it? Because the current output is very scary and very hard to decipher by a general user:
http://www.zive.cz/uploadedfiles/38598240.png So what if we detected that we failed to find a partition having "Fedora-Live" in its name (thus most probably an incorrectly created LiveUSB), and in that case printed out something like this?
- It seems Fedora Live image could not have been accessed. This often happens *
- when Live USB media is incorrectly created by a third-party USB installer. *
- Please refer to official documentation on fedoraproject.org for proper *
- instructions. *
(native speakers will surely make it sound better)
We might be able to do this along with a module that assumes live instead of normal boot.
-- Brian C. Lane | Anaconda Team | IRC: bcl #anaconda | Port Orchard, WA (PST8PDT) -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel Fedora Code of Conduct: http://fedoraproject.org/code-of-conduct
Some ideas:
- First and foremost, we should obviously consider whether we can make
some compose changes that would make the image more compatible with third-party USB installers. That's very technical, but I hope relevant people could provide some comments here.
I suppose we could install a dracut module for the live initrd that assumes live by default instead of depending on the rd.live.image argument. But that won't help much when they totally mangle the cmdline or the iso label.
Quite interestingly, I tested unetbooting (fc20 version) with F20 Live once again, and the flash drive worked this time. So either something was fixed very recently, or there needs to be several factors in it (existing partition layout, existing filesystem, host operating system etc), because this is something people report really often. And of course similar apps are broken as well, like the "Universal USB installer" from the review (I'd have to use Windows to test that one).
So, I haven't managed to find out where exactly the problem is, because it worked for me this time, but I have noticed that "rd.live.image" and "root=live:UUID=xxx" kernel options were present even on the freshly created USB stick (it replaces initial Fedora boot menu with its own boot menu).
- Third, if everything goes wrong and you end up in a dracut shell, could
we at least advise our users what went wrong and what to do with it? Because the current output is very scary and very hard to decipher by a general user: http://www.zive.cz/uploadedfiles/38598240.png So what if we detected that we failed to find a partition having "Fedora-Live" in its name (thus most probably an incorrectly created LiveUSB), and in that case printed out something like this?
- It seems Fedora Live image could not have been accessed. This often
happens *
- when Live USB media is incorrectly created by a third-party USB
installer. *
- Please refer to official documentation on fedoraproject.org for proper
- instructions.
(native speakers will surely make it sound better)
We might be able to do this along with a module that assumes live instead of normal boot.
That would be great. If we have a special dracut module, don't we have problems when copying Live image to disk - won't that module be copied as well? The warning could be a part of the standard module, just activated when "Fedora-Live" or something similar is in the LABEL we searched for but not found. Is it possible/good idea?
-
Brian C. Lane -
Kamil Paral -
Naheem Zaffar