[Fedora-livecd-list] RFE: allow multi live medium

[Till Maas]

Sorry for my late reply, somehow your mail got marked as read here, without me 
really reading it. :-/

On Tue November 4 2008, Jeremy Katz wrote:
> On Tue, 2008-11-04 at 10:10 +0100, Till Maas wrote:
> > I would like to create a usb device that contains several live mediums.
> > Afaics, this is currently not possible, unless I use a separate partition
> > for each live medium, because they all expect LiveOS to be the directory
> > containing some images. Attached is a patch agains mkliveinitrd from the
> > current rawhide cvs repository that makes it possible to pass a
> > "live_dir" kernel parameter, that is then used instead of LiveOS.
>
> This has now come up a couple of times.  Unfortunately, changing it
> makes things a lot more complicated.  Right now, I know that if I have a
> LiveOS directory, that's the live image and that's what I have to warn
> people about if we change.  If instead, it could be in any directory,
> how does the boot loader bits get handled?

> So while this gets some of the simple bits, if this is something that's
> worth supporting, I'd rather think about the whole picture.
> 1) Do we want to support this just off of USB-type media or on CDs also?

Normally I do not use optical media, but since DVDs do not cost much more than 
CDs here, I consider a multi Live DVD useful, too. For DVDs it would be also 
helpful if one could create a DVD that also contains all the original iso 
images and is able to boot from then. It would also be nice to have a 
combined full installation DVD with live support I guess.

> 2) How do we want to namespace so that we can better support multiples
> and have them identifiable?

I guess the easiest way would be to use the name of the iso/torrent file for 
each live image, e.g.:

LiveOS/F10-i686-Live
LiveOS/F10-i686-Live-KDE

or even seperate directories in the root of the filesystem. What I would 
really enjoy would be a generic bootloader that would recognize any iso image 
on the medium and would allow to chainboot them. I believe at least 
chainbooting iso images is possible with grub2, but I did not yet test it.

> 3) How do we want to handle the boot-loader pieces if we have multiple
> OS options on the same medium?

I do not yet have an answer for this.

> > How do you like this patch and do I have to submit it via bugzilla to the
> > mkinitrd component to get it included?
>
> On this list is fine

I noticed that the patch is not yet applied. Are there any reasons against it, 
because it is not yet necessary to decide the open questions for the 
frontends that use the boot param yet, because they will not need the patch 
to be modified. Unless of course booting .iso files is added, but this is 
more a plan for the far away future.

> > Do you know other places on the live
> > medium that use a hardcoded LiveOS directory?
>
> There's definitely at least livecd-iso-to-disk.  Possibly some of the
> install pieces, but I'd have to go double-check.  And also some things
> in the livesys initscript.

Yes, it is hardcoded in the livesys initscript. Where does it come from? I 
cannot find it or any reference to it in the livecd git repository and it is 
also not owned by any package on the live medium.

Regards,
Till
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