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

[Kamil Paral]

> > 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.

Quite interestingly, I tested unetbooting (fc20 version) with F20 Live once again, and the flash drive worked this time. So either something was fixed very recently, or there needs to be several factors in it (existing partition layout, existing filesystem, host operating system etc), because this is something people report really often. And of course similar apps are broken as well, like the "Universal USB installer" from the review (I'd have to use Windows to test that one).

So, I haven't managed to find out where exactly the problem is, because it worked for me this time, but I have noticed that "rd.live.image" and "root=live:UUID=xxx" kernel options were present even on the freshly created USB stick (it replaces initial Fedora boot menu with its own boot menu).

> > 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.

That would be great. If we have a special dracut module, don't we have problems when copying Live image to disk - won't that module be copied as well? The warning could be a part of the standard module, just activated when "Fedora-Live" or something similar is in the LABEL we searched for but not found. Is it possible/good idea?