Written by Warbo the 27 Aug 08 at 06:39.
Category: Installation.
Related project:
Nothing/Others.
Status: New
Rationale
There is a nifty looking utility newly made for Fedora, found here https://fedorahosted.org/liveusb-creator , which will turn a live CD iso (either local or downloading it first) into a live USB installation, with an optional amount of persistent storage area.
The tool is coded in Python and QT4, so it works on Windows and Linux. I know that distros like to keep any advantage they can over each other, but nevertheless it would be awesome to see this tool get some more love and for it to become more generic.
I'm a little confused about the Flash option, but that's probably because I much prefer SWFDec. I would like to see it being as generic as possible, perhaps adding a certain plaintext config file to a live CD to make it compatible?
For relatively small USB drives it really is pretty nice, especially the hardware autodetection. I have a 4GB USB stick with a proper Debian installation on it at the moment. It gets around the hackishness of the persistent store but means I need to reconfigure X, networking, etc. for each computer I put it on, and I'm using plain ReiserFS rather than any compressed filesystem like Ubuntu's Casper. If I could build a custom CD of any distro and make it run compressed with livecd-like autodetection then I would be a happy man indeed :P
I wouldn't say it's an exact duplicate, since it hinges not on having a USB image but on having a tool which can nondestructively put a bootloader, persistent storage AND an image onto any drive (the nondestructive bit is the killer feature IMHO, since it would make installing onto USB drives/iPods/etc. at events much easier, since I currently have to check with people exactly what files they want to keep, how much FAT32 storage to keep on the drive, etc. before formatting and repartitioning the rest. Allowing it to all run from FAT32 would be ace.).
I'm not going to complain about being marked as a duplicate though, since the developer comments for idea #16 do mention such a tool.
Working with Fedora on theirs (or merging the 2 projects) would help for those occasions where you need to build a liveUSB for a distribution other than the class of distro you happen to be using (building Fedora/RH/Centos liveUSB under Ubuntu, for example). I came across that very situation today, where I needed to make a Centos liveUSB in order to run firmware updates that run under the OS (Linux or Windows). The updates made various presumptions about the environment they would run under, so the standard Ubuntu, Slackware or whatever-else-based distributions wouldn't work. It needed a Fedora/RH-like setup.