On Mon, 2007-03-26 at 16:33 -0400, Jeremy Katz wrote:
When thinking about what we want for booting a live image with a USB
stick, I realized that realistically, we don't want to be distributing a
"live USB" image. Because that requires running dd and destroying
whatever data you already happen to have on your USB stick.
A better choice is to take the live CD image and copy the bits from it
to your USB stick. The result is the attached script. Run it with
arguments of the live CD iso image and the device of your USB key and it
copies over the bits of the live CD onto your USB stick and makes it
bootable. Supported filesystems for your USB stick are vfat/msdos and
ext23.
What do people think? It seems to work from some quick testing and it's
impressive just how much faster it is going from a USB stick.
I think this is a pretty awesome idea; we would just include it in the
livecd-tools RPM and call it 'livecd-iso-to-stick'? Then we can always
rewrite this in Python including teaching it about D-Bus system bus
activation so we can write a nice little UI that runs unprivileged.
I do think, at some point, we want livecd-creator to be able to write
out other things than an ISO [1].
David
[1] : e.g. OLPC wants to transition to livecd-creator from pilgrim and
they need to be able to build jffs2 and partitioned bootable ext3 images
too. But more about that later.