boot.iso vs netinst.iso vs efiboot.img

Adam Williamson awilliam at redhat.com
Mon Jan 28 00:25:47 UTC 2013


On Sat, 2013-01-26 at 09:38 -0700, Chris Murphy wrote:

> [1] I'm honestly confused why LiveCD Creator is recommended first and
> second. Livecd-tools is recommended 3rd. And dd is linguistically not
> recommended, ergo recommended only as a last resort. I have had
> extremely high success with dd to USB media, and comparatively low
> success with the other methods. livecd-tools can be as good, but it's
> 15000% more complicated, and the Installation Guide provides zero
> guidance on any of the livecd-tools switches for either UEFI use case,
> so failure here will be very high.
> 
> Why is this order being used? dd is recommended dead last, really?
> Maybe someone more experienced with installations with the various
> methods can convince me that dd is actually pretty flakey and I've
> been lucky.

liveusb-creator is graphical, hence the recommendation. At the time
these docs were originally written, it was probably equal to
livecd-creator in functionality.

livecd-creator is considerably more flexible than dd; it allows you to
set up persistent storage and to use a stick without wiping existing
data it contains. At the time the docs were originally written, it's
likely dd was less reliable than it is now, and probably still had
problems it no longer does (remember when a dd'ed DVD would not find the
packages on the stick and would act as a netinst image, for instance).

It would be fine to bring all of these more into line with modern usage,
I think.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | identi.ca: adamwfedora
http://www.happyassassin.net



More information about the test mailing list