Comments on: Comparing openSUSE 11.2 and Kubuntu Karmic LiveUSB setups

By: milan zimmermann

milan zimmermann — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 17:19:17 +0000

I just wanted to mention that I tried the version from 14th August and it works very well. I used 8GB Sandisk, it took abu 10 minutes to install. After that, it is best to setup video soon and run in gui mode as yast in terminal mode is a bit difficult .

Anyway, I wonder why is this “unofficial” – I think this is a very useful thing! Unetbootin did NOt work for me with Suse Factory.

Good work.

By: rhorstkoetter

rhorstkoetter — Sun, 09 Aug 2009 15:32:26 +0000

Pretty much the same (a simple application called live-usb-creator) is available for Ubuntu as well – not to mention unetbootin (you already did that). The result of live-usb-creator in both Ubuntu and Fedora actually is to utilize syslinux as the boot-loader and to create a loopback casper-rw file containing an ext2 partition for persistence. While this is most likely the most straightforward method for the end user, I myself currently prefer GRUB as a bootloader in combination with a casper-rw partition as described in the blog post. As of unetbootin: this method uses syslinux as the bootloader as well and sets up non-persistent liveusb media, while it’s certainly possible to adjust the syslinux configuration for a persistent casper-rw file or partition afterwards (with the result that you end up with the very same result of ubuntu/fedora’s live-usb-creator)

Thanks for contributing!

By: Matteo

Matteo — Sun, 09 Aug 2009 13:10:20 +0000

ops… sorry for the big link! I forgot to close the tag!

By: Matteo

Matteo — Sun, 09 Aug 2009 13:07:03 +0000

I prefer Fedora's method: they provide a simple application that takes care of the entire job (downloads the image, copy to usb drive, activate persistent environment) and let you do that without erasing your usb drive (very important imho!). On sourceforge there's also , a similar application but ready to be used with different distributions (it works with suse, ubuntu, and almost any other distro). And it's really easy to use, I suggest you to give it a try! Actually I tried the dd method to boot the milestone 5 on my pc, but it didn't work :( maybe is still the cd-rom bug?

By: rhorstkoetter

rhorstkoetter — Sun, 09 Aug 2009 12:36:32 +0000

JFYI, there are UNOFFICIAL oemtype, i.e. persistent, raw usb-images available at http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/openSUSE:/Factory:/Live/images/ (thanks Beineri for the hint)

According to coolo, those usb-images are provided as is and filing bug reports against them are INVALID without specifying the full path. While the current KDE build (openSUSE-11.2-usb-kde.i686-2.8.0-Build142.1.raw.bz2) doesn’t work for me, I think the resource is worth mentioning here and thus I herewith share it. My personal copy of the usb-image fails with “failed to find MBR identifier” followed by a reboot.

To deploy those images, do:
# bunzip2 openSUSE-11.2-usb-kde.i686-2.8.0-Build142.1.raw.bz2
# dd if=openSUSE-11.2-usb-kde.i686-2.8.0-Build142.1.raw of=/dev/”usbdrive” bs=4M

I also tested to lower the blocksize (bs=32k) but this ended up with the very same error message “failed to find MBR identifier”. I myself will monitor the Factory repo for more recent builds though.

By: rhorstkoetter

rhorstkoetter — Sun, 09 Aug 2009 10:08:27 +0000

You’re talking about the “toram” boot-option supported by linux live scripts http://www.linux-live.org/ right?

By: Vavai

Vavai — Sat, 08 Aug 2009 22:47:16 +0000

+1,
It should be a cool idea and a cool feature. Casper-rw aufs could also extend it’s feature to run completely within RAM (toram feature).