[Fedora-livecd-list] Live USB converter script

David Zeuthen davidz at redhat.com
Mon Mar 26 21:24:25 UTC 2007


On Mon, 2007-03-26 at 16:33 -0400, Jeremy Katz wrote:
> When thinking about what we want for booting a live image with a USB
> stick, I realized that realistically, we don't want to be distributing a
> "live USB" image.  Because that requires running dd and destroying
> whatever data you already happen to have on your USB stick.
> 
> A better choice is to take the live CD image and copy the bits from it
> to your USB stick.  The result is the attached script.  Run it with
> arguments of the live CD iso image and the device of your USB key and it
> copies over the bits of the live CD onto your USB stick and makes it
> bootable.  Supported filesystems for your USB stick are vfat/msdos and
> ext23.
> 
> What do people think?  It seems to work from some quick testing and it's
> impressive just how much faster it is going from a USB stick.

I think this is a pretty awesome idea; we would just include it in the
livecd-tools RPM and call it 'livecd-iso-to-stick'? Then we can always
rewrite this in Python including teaching it about D-Bus system bus
activation so we can write a nice little UI that runs unprivileged.

I do think, at some point, we want livecd-creator to be able to write
out other things than an ISO [1]. 

     David

[1] : e.g. OLPC wants to transition to livecd-creator from pilgrim and
they need to be able to build jffs2 and partitioned bootable ext3 images
too. But more about that later.





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