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.
What about offering liveusb-creator at the first place instead of ISO?
2014-07-31 11:04 GMT+02:00 Kamil Paral kparal@redhat.com:
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%3E or Arch < https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/USB_Flash_Installation_Media#Using_UNet...
.
- 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:
- 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.
- 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?
- 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%3E, 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. -- test mailing list test@lists.fedoraproject.org To unsubscribe: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/test
What about offering liveusb-creator at the first place instead of ISO?
Actually, this might be a great idea. Not "instead", but if we provided two buttons instead of one:
[Download DVD image] [Download USB installer]
people would immediately saw the difference. If they were after USB installation media, they wouldn't download a DVD image and then wonder what to do with it (as they do now), no, they would immediately click the second button. Our USB installer is already capable of both reusing an existing image and downloading a fresh one, so this goes well hand in hand. And the page serving you the file could be tailored to the particular method, so DVD download would show you basic DVD burning instructions, while USB installer download would show you basic USB conversion instructions.
Mairin, I guess you're the best person to talk about fp.o design, what do you think? (Please read the start of this thread). Thanks.
On 8/1/2014 5:21 AM, Kamil Paral wrote:
What about offering liveusb-creator at the first place instead of ISO?
Actually, this might be a great idea. Not "instead", but if we provided two buttons instead of one:
[Download DVD image] [Download USB installer]
people would immediately saw the difference. If they were after USB installation media, they wouldn't download a DVD image and then wonder what to do with it (as they do now), no, they would immediately click the second button. Our USB installer is already capable of both reusing an existing image and downloading a fresh one, so this goes well hand in hand. And the page serving you the file could be tailored to the particular method, so DVD download would show you basic DVD burning instructions, while USB installer download would show you basic USB conversion instructions.
Mairin, I guess you're the best person to talk about fp.o design, what do you think? (Please read the start of this thread). Thanks.
A problem is that the .iso versions offered for download in the liveusb-creator GUI always seem to lag behind.
On 08/01/2014 05:21 AM, Kamil Paral wrote:
What about offering liveusb-creator at the first place instead of ISO?
Actually, this might be a great idea. Not "instead", but if we provided two buttons instead of one:
[Download DVD image] [Download USB installer]
people would immediately saw the difference. If they were after USB installation media, they wouldn't download a DVD image and then wonder what to do with it (as they do now), no, they would immediately click the second button. Our USB installer is already capable of both reusing an existing image and downloading a fresh one, so this goes well hand in hand. And the page serving you the file could be tailored to the particular method, so DVD download would show you basic DVD burning instructions, while USB installer download would show you basic USB conversion instructions.
Mairin, I guess you're the best person to talk about fp.o design, what do you think? (Please read the start of this thread). Thanks.
Previous post: "A problem is that the .iso versions offered for download in the liveusb-creator GUI always seem to lag behind."
more testing:
I just tested on Yoga Pro 2 running native resolution and Widows 8.1 OS and the liveusb-creator is postage stamp size on the screen. It needs to be run in compatability mode as an administrator to work. Most of the functions appear to work but using the update button I got Soas f17 x86_64 and did not download in the 25 minutes I tested it. I tested on a second USB that was written previously with fedora live with dd. It was not writable. the terminal command liveusb-creator --reset-mbr did not run in Windows terminal.(It worked in linux gparted with create new partition table and format fat32 label LIVE boot flag.) I could then use the windows 8.1 liveusb-creator to write an existing soas.iso downloaded earlier in windows firefox.
In short there are a number of things that need to fixed in the windows version of liveusb.creator before offering it on the fedora download options. 1-) detect screen resolution and properly display GUI 2-) run in compatability mode (run as administrator) 3-) run as liveusb-creator --reset-mbr by default (this can be done in linux by editing the icon command) 4-)Fix the Download button on the GUI to work and be up to date.
On Fri, 2014-08-01 at 08:21 -0400, Kamil Paral wrote:
What about offering liveusb-creator at the first place instead of ISO?
Actually, this might be a great idea. Not "instead", but if we provided two buttons instead of one:
So I want to inject a note of caution on this one. A few of us who deal with boot stuff - me for QA purposes, mjg59 and pjones who actually know what's going on, and lmacken who maintains luc right now - talked this over a few months back, and what would like to do with luc is kill it, or at least radically revise it. It's kind of a bad tool.
We have this problem where we do the same work (make a USB stick bootable on BIOS, UEFI and Macs, basically) three times: well when generating the images (which is why 'dd' works reliably), pretty well in livecd-iso-to-disk so long as you pass the right options (which is why that tool's the best second choice), and really pretty badly in luc (it's better than it used to be, but still not great; I don't believe it writes Mac-bootable images, and it's easy to use an existing stick and wind up with something non-bootable because of filesystem or MBR issues). We need to do that work just once, ideally.
luc doesn't have anywhere near enough development resources; I think it comes like five or six items down lmacken's priority list, and he's the sole person working on it. I don't think that's enough support to lean on too strongly for 'official distribution' purposes. This is why I revised the USB instructions on the wiki to prioritize dd-style apps for Windows and de-emphasize luc.
I think what we'd have in an ideal world is a Windows tool that distros which ship dd-friendly images (ourselves, Arch, SUSE, Mageia...) could share and possibly customize, but which shared the core 'dd this image to this stick' code and maybe had a standard API you could provide a list of your distro's images to or whatever. You can do persistent storage with a dd-style tool, potentially; all it needs to do is dd the image and then create empty partition(s) in the remaining spare space on the stick and use *those* for persistence. The only thing you can't do with dd-style writing is a non-destructive write, but that's far less important than it used to be now you get 16GB USB sticks free with breakfast cereal (more or less).
If we can't manage that, I'm a fan of making it more obvious from the download pages how to get a USB stick *somehow* - some better integration of the download page and the USB writing instructions and existing tools - but I'm not sure the current luc is good enough and supported enough to promote as a primary delivery mechanism.
So I want to inject a note of caution on this one. A few of us who deal with boot stuff - me for QA purposes, mjg59 and pjones who actually know what's going on, and lmacken who maintains luc right now - talked this over a few months back, and what would like to do with luc is kill it, or at least radically revise it. It's kind of a bad tool.
We have this problem where we do the same work (make a USB stick bootable on BIOS, UEFI and Macs, basically) three times: well when generating the images (which is why 'dd' works reliably), pretty well in livecd-iso-to-disk so long as you pass the right options (which is why that tool's the best second choice), and really pretty badly in luc (it's better than it used to be, but still not great; I don't believe it writes Mac-bootable images, and it's easy to use an existing stick and wind up with something non-bootable because of filesystem or MBR issues). We need to do that work just once, ideally.
luc doesn't have anywhere near enough development resources; I think it comes like five or six items down lmacken's priority list, and he's the sole person working on it. I don't think that's enough support to lean on too strongly for 'official distribution' purposes. This is why I revised the USB instructions on the wiki to prioritize dd-style apps for Windows and de-emphasize luc.
I think what we'd have in an ideal world is a Windows tool that distros which ship dd-friendly images (ourselves, Arch, SUSE, Mageia...) could share and possibly customize, but which shared the core 'dd this image to this stick' code and maybe had a standard API you could provide a list of your distro's images to or whatever. You can do persistent storage with a dd-style tool, potentially; all it needs to do is dd the image and then create empty partition(s) in the remaining spare space on the stick and use *those* for persistence. The only thing you can't do with dd-style writing is a non-destructive write, but that's far less important than it used to be now you get 16GB USB sticks free with breakfast cereal (more or less).
Thanks for behind-the-scenes story, I couldn't agree more here.
If we can't manage that, I'm a fan of making it more obvious from the download pages how to get a USB stick *somehow* - some better integration of the download page and the USB writing instructions and existing tools - but I'm not sure the current luc is good enough and supported enough to promote as a primary delivery mechanism.
Even though luc has so many issues, and even though our Fedora wiki guide [1] no longer lists is as the first option, I had the notion that it was already *the tool* recommended by default. Because fedoraproject.org only links to our docs page [2], where it is the first tool mentioned for both Linux and Windows users. Unfortunately I don't see fp.o linking to [1] anywhere.
So maybe this is something we could easily improve on? Let's make those USB writing instructions a bit more visible (because nowadays, USB booting really concerns at least every other person). And if we're sure we don't want to recommend luc, let's put there the "quick start" method from [1] at least for Windows, i.e. recommending dd-alternatives like "SUSE Studio ImageWriter or Rawrite32". Could we do something about duplication of [1] and [2]? Maybe link to [1] instead of [2] from fp.o?
[1] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/How_to_create_and_use_Live_USB [2] http://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/Fedora/20/html/Installation_Guide/Making...
Of course, I still see a lot of value in printing a reasonable dracut message in case the boot fails (a safety net of some kind), so that would be a second thing where we can improve things easily. I can request it in the Bugzilla, or maybe there is some volunteer to create the patch?
On Mon, 2014-08-04 at 04:24 -0400, Kamil Paral wrote:
Even though luc has so many issues, and even though our Fedora wiki guide [1] no longer lists is as the first option, I had the notion that it was already *the tool* recommended by default. Because fedoraproject.org only links to our docs page [2], where it is the first tool mentioned for both Linux and Windows users. Unfortunately I don't see fp.o linking to [1] anywhere.
So maybe this is something we could easily improve on? Let's make those USB writing instructions a bit more visible (because nowadays, USB booting really concerns at least every other person). And if we're sure we don't want to recommend luc, let's put there the "quick start" method from [1] at least for Windows, i.e. recommending dd-alternatives like "SUSE Studio ImageWriter or Rawrite32". Could we do something about duplication of [1] and [2]? Maybe link to [1] instead of [2] from fp.o?
[1] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/How_to_create_and_use_Live_USB [2] http://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/Fedora/20/html/Installation_Guide/Making...
So, I edit the wiki because, well, it's easy - I hit 'edit' and edit it and it's done. (The flip side of this is that every six months or so I notice someone's edited it with some wacky notion or other and I have to go and try to diplomatically remove / de-emphasize that). To edit the doc guide I'd have to go and deal with docbook and come up with a git patch and submit it for review by docs team, which isn't really a terribly high bar but is still harder than 'edit wiki page, now you're done', especially when wiki syntax is more or less tattooed into my brain.
but yeah, it does kind of suck to have both, but I understand the docs team's reluctance to kill the docs guide when the wiki is a bit more 'wild west'ish. Not sure what the best choice would be - probably it'd be good to get the two singing from more or less the same hymn sheet, in the short term.
On Thu, 31 Jul 2014, Kamil Paral wrote:
- 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 *
Better yet: * Get liveusb-creator at https://fedorahosted.org/liveusb-creator/ *
- instructions. *
-
Adam Williamson -
František Zatloukal -
Kamil Paral -
Michael Hennebry -
Thomas Gilliard