livecds in the future

[Peter Jones]

On 11/24/2009 04:58 PM, John Reiser wrote:
> On 11/24/2009 01:38 PM, Peter Jones wrote:
>> On 11/24/2009 04:25 PM, Adam Williamson wrote:
> 
>>> Mandriva Flash - Mandriva's commercial system-on-a-USB-stick thingy -
>>> does exactly what you confidently proclaim to be impossible. It comes
>>> with a CD ISO you can burn onto a CD (or mini-CD) that allows you to
>>> 'chain-boot' the Flash on systems with crappy BIOSes that can't boot
>>> from a USB stick (yes, they exist, but are getting progressively rarer,
>>> obviously).
> 
>> I don't suppose you can easily fish out a url for the source to this? 
>> I'd like
>> to see what they're actually doing.
> 
> I've done it using Fedora 12, on an old Dell i686 laptop whose BIOS
> cannot boot USB.  A typical GRUB stanza has a line such as:
>   kernel /vmlinuz ro root=live:label='Feodra 12 i386 DVD'
> rootfstype=auto ...
> where /vmlinuz is the kernel on the CD, and root=live:label='...'
> designates the label of the device for the root (and init, and ...),
> which can be USB, DVD, another CD, any block device that the Linux kernel
> /vmlinuz can enumerate and understand.
> 

This is a different thing than what was being discussed - they were talking
about chain booting device B from device A, not about booting off of A and
mounting a root fs that's on "B".  The latter is obviously trivial, and indeed
something our installer can already set up (though as a permanent installation,
not as another form of install media.)

-- 
        Peter

I hope you know that this will go down on your permanent record.