openSUSE 11.0 with tons of impovement has been announced on June 19, 2008. Since then it was a busiest day for me : setting up a local mirror providing iso image for openSUSE fans in Indonesia, arrange openSUSE 11.0 release party and preparing Indonesian openSUSE community regular meeting on Saturday, June 21, 2008. We have planned all of these since last month but I must updated the planning with latest news and preparation.

Beside the planning, I also read some comments that noticed me with problem regarding openSUSE LiveUSB tutorial. The tutorial used openSUSE 11.0 RC1 and the modified initrd as noticed on the tutorial doesn’t fit with the GM version.

I have updated the initrdud that *should be*  applied with openSUSE 11.0 GM. I got it succeeded with my 2 GB USB Flash Disk. The overall process to make openSUSE 11.0 GM LiveUSB are same as described on the previous tutorial with RC1. The different thing is initrdud file.

Download the modified initrd file (called initrdud) from this link.

How to Modify the Initrd

Initrd modification needed to add nls_cp437.ko, module for mount vfat partition that commonly used by USB flash disk.

1. Preparing your LiveUSB ISO. In this example, I used openSUSE-11.0-KDE4-LiveCD-i386.iso. Change with your downloaded LiveCD ISO instead
2. Preparing, Extract and update the initrd

su
mkdir unpacked
mkdir /mnt/iso
mkdir /mnt/squash
mount -o loop openSUSE-11.0-KDE4-LiveCD-i386.iso /mnt/iso/
cd unpacked
gzip -dc /mnt/iso/boot/i386/loader/initrd | cpio -i
mount -o loop /mnt/iso/openSUSE-*read-only.* /mnt/squash/
cp /mnt/squash/lib/modules/*/kernel/fs/nls/nls_cp437.ko lib/modules/*/kernel/fs/nls/
cp /mnt/squash/lib/modules/*/kernel/fs/nls/nls_iso8859-1.ko lib/modules/*/kernel/fs/nls/
cp -r /mnt/squash/lib/modules/*/kernel/fs/vfat lib/modules/*/kernel/fs/
cp -r /mnt/squash/lib/modules/*/kernel/fs/fat lib/modules/*/kernel/fs/


3. Edit the linuxrc file and change /bin/sh on top of the file with /bin/sh -x. This used for verbose option while boot, every command will be display before executed so if there is a problem, it will more easier to resolve.
4. Modify the include file and change (replace) the function CDDevice with below code. This will change LiveCD to LiveUSB.

function CDDevice {
	# /.../
	# changed this function so that it finds config.isoclient on vfat disks, e.g. USB drives
	# ----
	find /lib/modules/*/kernel/fs/nls/nls* -exec insmod {} \; # needed for vfat filesystem
        find /lib/modules/*/kernel/fs/*fat/*.ko -exec insmod {} \; # needed for vfat filesystem
        insmod /lib/modules/*/kernel/drivers/usb/storage/usb-storage.ko # needed for USB
	sleep 5 # fixme; do this in a proper way
	cddevs=`/usr/sbin/hwinfo --disk | grep sd | grep "Device File:" | cut -f2 -d: | cut -f2 -d " "` # looks for disks instead of CDs
	echo cddevs $cddevs
	for i in $cddevs;do
		i=$i"1" # fixme; looks on the first partition only
		echo i $i
		if [ -b $i ];then
			test -z $cddev && cddev=$i || cddev=$cddev:$i
			echo cddev $cddev
		fi
	done
	if [ -z $cddev ]; then
		systemException \
			“Failed to detect CD drive !” \
		“reboot”
	fi
}

5. Repack the initrd. We will place the initrdud in root of cureent folder :

find . | cpio -o -H newc | gzip -9 > ../initrdud

Hope the above process solve the problem while making openSUSE 11.0 GM LiveUSB. Don’t forget to place a comment if you got any problem regarding this tutorial.

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