Pressed media idea

[Máirín Duffy]

On Fri, 2010-08-27 at 10:22 -0500, inode0 wrote:
> On Fri, Aug 27, 2010 at 10:13 AM, Stephen Gallagher <sgallagh at redhat.com> wrote:
> > Might I make another suggestion? Encourage interested parties to bring
> > (or purchase nearby) a 4GB flash drive and just set up a couple stations
> > for creating their own bootable flash drive, either with the live media
> > or the DVD install.
> 
> This is a nice idea but it is not easy to communicate to people who
> you don't know in advance are going to come to the event. In large
> numbers it is also a rather slow and cumbersome process. We had the
> experience once of everyone getting a blank USB stick which they could
> bring to our booth and we put a live image on it for them. The result
> was a lot of USB sticks sitting at the booth and people doing little
> more than putting images on them when they could have been talking to
> people. So there are advantages and disadvantages both ways.

It is entirely too difficult to create LiveUSB keys. This is going to be
a far worse problem when we move to > 650mb images. 

I spent 5 hours, trying half a dozen different USB sticks, and trying
the process on three separate machines (all F13) this past Wednesday
morning in order to make a single LiveUSB key. Now, I know what I'm
doing, better than the average bear at least. The instructions in our
documentation are wrong (bug filed), the instructions in the wiki didn't
work (but they have before), and in general the tech seems flaky. The
LiveUSB-creator UI didn't work at all - it produced 3 different keys
that did not boot (missing isolinux.img it claimed although the file was
there the fs layout was totally different than a working key). 

You *should* be able to just stick the key in, fire up live-usb creator,
and hold a productive conversation. Creating a LiveUSB key should not be
so intensive that you can't hold a conversation with someone.

</rant>

~m