Please check the status of this specification in Launchpad before editing it. If it is Approved, contact the Assignee or another knowledgeable person before making changes.

• Launchpad Entry: foo

• Packages affected:

Live/Install from USB key

• Much faster for ISO testing
• Avoid "CD blanks"
• Works on machines with optical drive
• USB key is a mass storage device (a hard drive)
  • Rather than a floppy disk

Use cases

• DD'able netboot image (small, just works)

  • netboot/boot.img.gz can be written to a partition; check whether it can also just be written to the disk device and if so update docs

  • We do currently have a PXE/ddable image but it needs one too many layers to extract it

  • https://help.ubuntu.com/7.04/installation-guide/i386/boot-usb-files.html#usb-copy-easy

• DD image with 1GB partition for copying in an alternate .iso
  • installer checks for /*.iso images on all local volumes

  • https://help.ubuntu.com/7.04/installation-guide/i386/boot-usb-files.html#usb-copy-flexible

  • https://help.ubuntu.com/7.04/installation-guide/i386/boot-usb-files.html#usb-add-iso

• Live CD image set up for persistency out of the box

  • http://www.debuntu.org/how-to-install-ubuntu-linux-on-usb-bar

Results

• Modify installer to check for:

  • /ubuntu*.iso containing either a .deb local repo

    • Already done for hd-media installer (alternate-style)
  • Live Ubuntu image containing a squashfs

Needs research

• Relationship to smart-boot-manager
• Syslinux/isolinux
  • Syslinux wrapper writes a bootsector "blob" to the front of the CD
    • opens as vfat with mtools
    • writes out ldlinux.sys
    • copies syslinux code (ldlinux.bss) into bootsector
• We can do the equivalent under MS Windows (rawrite) provided that we ship the two files above on the CD
  • Question: can we access the raw device without Administrator privileges?

• http://www.weethet.nl/english/hardware_bootfromusbstick.php

  • Method involving the MS Windows formatting "[x] Create start up disk".

Targets

• Desktop CD on USB --- (direct dd > /dev/sdb); should work but believed to be buggy at the moment

• Desktop CD on USB with local ISO --- not interesting (except for having a small bootstrap image)
• Desktop CD on USB with persistence

  • https://wiki.ubuntu.com/LiveUsbPendrivePersistent

• Netboot on USB with network fetch
• Netboot on USB with local alternate .iso

Wants

Transformation utility that takes a .iso image and it works out what to do with it

Should work for Linux and Windows, so possibly two separate applications

• "Write to USB key?"
• MAKE THE DESKTOPCD ON USB WORK.
  • Makes ISO testing easier
  • The place where we have less technical users.
  • Persistence?
  • ALREADY COVERED BY WUBI!
• Casper to look for .iso and look inside for squashfs, mount boot that
  • Hunt though top-level directories
    • Modify checkdev in casper, recurse one level.
      • Already done for wubi installer.
• Make persistency not check for partition label
• Copy /contents/ of .iso image to vfat.
• Copy .iso to USB stick
• Fish vmlinuz and initrd out of .iso
• Run syslinux
• Make a Unix script to do this
• Ask somebody to reimplement for MS Windows
• Point to this from the CD download pages.

• Provide a mini DesktopCD dd-able image of the above.

CategorySpec