Playing with openSUSE on LiveUSB Stick
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Today (Tuesday in Indonesia, May 20, 2008) is a public holiday in Indonesia regarding Waisak day (Waisak is a Buddhist event). My agenda for this holiday is give a training session about Zimbra Collaboration Suite with openSUSE 10.3. The training session started on 09.00 am until 03.00 pm but I think I can spare about minimum 20% of my holiday time to an interesting stuff. It’s a public holiday and I don’t want to work all of the time 
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The first interesting stuff is making a LiveUSB stick for openSUSE. It’s not a really new because KIWI has an entry about how to make a live usb on openSUSE wiki, but I give it another try after reading Coolo’s announcement about new factory snapshot on Sunday, May 18, 2008.
http://ftp.suse.com/pub/projects/FactoryLiveCDs/ has new live cds as of today. Please note that it also has the first experimental release of live usb images.
- Plugin in usb stick
- Check dmesg output about the device name (e.g. sdc)
- Umount all possibly automounted file systems
- bzip2 -cd <download>.raw.bz2 | dd of=/dev/<device_name> bs=4096
It’s the first experimental release, so, it would be produces an error on live USB processing. Mailing list thread show some of the problem regarding this experimental. With a simple command to making a live USB, the experiment seems to be a nice addon for next RC1 release 
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The third way for making a LiveUSB stick with openSUSE is a wiki entry on klik.atekon.de, “Customize SUSE Live”. Luiz Fernando send an information about his work for making LiveUSB based on openSUSE 11.0 beta 3.
I tried making a LiveUSB from LiveCD of Beta3 following this tutorial http://klik.atekon.de/wiki/index.php/CustomizeSUSELive which I only had to make a new initrd with support for usb-storage, vfat modules. More…
So, I have 3 option for making a LiveUSB stick with openSUSE as my agenda before and after Zimbra training session.
The second interesting stuff is related with Zimbra itself. I’m thinking to write unattended Zimbra installation script on openSUSE 10.3 while on the way to work place yesterday morning. With the easier way to install Zimbra on openSUSE, I hope I can reached wide openSUSE adoption in server side and in enterprise solution, especially in Indonesia.
I will describe the idea and how to make it possible in next post.
Thanks a lot for the updated LiveUSB information. I’ve ever dreamed about it being that easy. Can’t wait to give it a try!
Hi,
The “work” is not mine, but from the author of that page. I just find that his way is easy and if ‘coolo’ make the initrd of LiveCD with the support of usb-storage, fat and vfat, it will be even easier as just extracting the ISO to USB and making the USB bootable (especially from windows users..)
regards,
Luiz
Hi Luiz,
Thank you for confirmation. I’m reading your reply to Coolo’s thread “Factory snapshot” on opensuse-factory mailing list and appreciated the information, although *maybe* it won’t be included in 11.0 release. If the tutorial at klik.atekon.de more easier than was provided by kiwi, people *should be* glad to heard your information