Filling the gaps in the spec: media

[Adam Williamson]

On Fri, 2014-02-21 at 23:32 +0200, Elad Alfassa wrote:
> On Fri, Feb 21, 2014 at 11:24 PM, Matthias Clasen <mclasen at redhat.com>wrote:
> 
> > Trying with a new thread: One of the edits I did yesterday was to add a
> > section for 'Installation methods and media'. So far, it is empty.
> >
> > Are there any ideas for doing something other than live USB sticks
> > here ?
> >
> > --
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> > desktop at lists.fedoraproject.org
> > https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop
> 
> 
> 
> I still think we should produce optical media (and have optical media as an
> option), if only because that's cheaper to give away in conferences :)

In practice, a live image below 4.7GB in size (and I don't think we're
likely to exceed that) is always going to be DVD-writeable, I believe.

> I'm all for pushing USB as the default, but for that to happen we need few
> things:
> 1) Have a working UI within Fedora to create Fedora USB sticks. This UI
> should be able to produce a stick that can boot both in EFI mode and Legacy
> Mode, unless we decide to drop support of non-EFI systems (too early for
> that I think)
> 
> 2) Rework the Windows version of liveusb-creator. It needs to support EFI
> as well, and we should probably get the executable signed. There has to be
> a safe and secure way for people to create LiveUSBs from Windows, and right
> now the internet is full of fake and virus ridden versions of this app. For
> incresed trust and security, this app should be downloadable from the main
> fedoraproject website (so it'll look more official than fedorahosted,
> especially cause that FedoraHosted page is confusing for newcomers), the
> executable has to be signed, and the UI itself probably needs a re-design
> if only so it won't look the same as all the fake versions that have been
> running around for years.
> 
> 3) A similar (GUI) solution for Mac OS should be devised as well.

We - me, mjg59, lmacken and I think pjones, IIRC - discussed this
recently. Our basic conclusion is we need to rationalize this whole
area, hard, because it's stupid.

The basic method of writing live media needs to be dd. We can do
persistence by having a very small partition at the end of the image and
having the writing tool (if it's something more sophisticated than dd)
expand that after doing the dd.

But we currently have two different tools which have to try and get the
tricky work to make an image BIOS *and* UEFI *and* Mac bootable right,
plus we have to make the image do that right when it's dd'ed.
Effectively we're doing all that tricky work three times (or, in the
case of liveusb-creator, not really doing it very well). That's silly.

Note, I recently revised
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/How_to_create_and_use_Live_USB (again)
quite heavily, and it now fairly strongly promotes graphical dd-like
utilities as the 'main approved method', and only suggests using litd or
luc if you actually want to do a non-destructive write or use
persistence. Non-destructive write was very very interesting when USB
sticks cost, like, $100. They are something people are less likely to
care about now you get one free with every box of Corn Flakes and most
people have so many lying around they use them for impromptu games of
table hockey. Persistence is still useful for some particular cases, but
it's certainly a minority pursuit: most people just want an image on a
USB stick, stat.

But yeah, it'd be nice to have a dd-ish graphical tool that was Fedora
branded, or at least not anything *else* branded, and ran on Linux, OS X
and Windows. Right now I'm recommending four different tools for three
different OSes, and we don't have anything graphical for non-GNOME Linux
or for OS X.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | XMPP: adamw AT happyassassin . net
http://www.happyassassin.net