the tragedy of Fedora Live USB conversion and what we can do about it

[Brian C. Lane]

On Thu, Jul 31, 2014 at 05:04:16AM -0400, Kamil Paral wrote:

> 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.
> 

I suppose we could install a dracut module for the live initrd that
assumes live by default instead of depending on the rd.live.image
argument. But that won't help much when they totally mangle the cmdline
or the iso label.

> 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?

I think this is the one that has the best chance for success. We need to
clearly direct people to the usb creation instructions, encourage use of
dd on linux/osx systems and liveusb-creator on Windows.

> 
> 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)

We might be able to do this along with a module that assumes live instead of
normal boot.

-- 
Brian C. Lane | Anaconda Team | IRC: bcl #anaconda | Port Orchard, WA (PST8PDT)