Mon, 11 Feb 2008
Creating live Fedora USB sticks, in Windows!
Last weekend I sat down and developed the liveusb-creator, a tool for creating live Fedora USB sticks from Windows. It will automatically detect all removable drives, find your ISO, extract it to your USB key, modify the syslinux.cfg, and install the bootloader. Technical details aside for a moment, the end-user workflow turns out to be something like this:
- Get Fedora Live Media.
- Download and extract liveusb-creator.zip
- Drag your Fedora Live media into the liveusb-creator directory
- Double click 'liveusb-creator.exe'
At the moment it is a simple a console application that asks the user if it has any questions (by default it won't), and then gets the job done. So shortly after announcing this tool, I started throwing together a graphical interface using PyGTK. While I was doing this, Kushal Das was on the other side of the planet working on a PyQT version :) It turns out his code is much cleaner than my gtk implementation, so I went ahead and committed it. Furthermore, I'm pretty excited to get a chance to play with The Other widget toolkit for once ;)
So, detecting removable devices and such is *trivial* in Windows using the powerfully-undocumented win32api Python module (after playing a few rounds of "match the return code to the enum", of course). Ideally, I want this tool to work in both Linux and Windows, so I redesigned the code quite a bit, broke it out into various modules, and recently started working on the Linux side of things. At this point in time, there is now code that detects removable drives using dbus and HAL. I still have a bunch of sanity checking and other bits to write, but progress is definitely being made. In the mean time for Linux users, see the USBHowTo for creating a live USB stick using the livecd-iso-to-disk tool.
If you're interested in helping out with the liveusb-creator, you can get ahold of the source code using git:
git clone git://git.fedorahosted.org/git/liveusb-creator.git
posted at: 08:38 | link | | 24 comments
Posted by Waqas Shafiq at Sat Mar 22 17:14:16 2008
Does not work :(
Oops! Something went wrong:
Sorry, I couldn't find any devices
Done!
Posted by edforrest at Sun Mar 23 20:54:03 2008
Before I try this, I was wondering if the USB installation with be persistent. I'd like to be able to save configuration settings to the USB key (space permitting, of course).
Thnx.
Posted by ash at Sun Mar 30 21:14:01 2008
it does not work. At boot, message is: No bootable partition in table.
Posted by Eric at Fri Apr 11 04:27:22 2008
I love the idea of this tool, but when I boot from the USB key I get the same message: No bootable partition in table. What am I missing?
Posted by Sergio at Fri Apr 25 15:03:09 2008
Same error as the previous messages. No bootable partition in table.
Posted by Lin Goodwin at Thu May 1 01:07:04 2008
Thanks;
I will test this extensively with USB flash and stick media.
Posted by Max Spevack at Thu May 1 09:47:02 2008
Brilliant work, Luke! I'm looking forward to testing out this version, and the getting it some really good publicity.
Posted by Marland V. Pittman at Thu May 1 11:26:42 2008
Awesome work! Finally a GUI, but on Windows first? Heh.
I want a GUI in Linux, so I don't have to boot to Windows to show my friends how easy it is to make a USB stick.
One time I thought about switching distros, but making the USB stick is too awesome. I'll stick with Fedora.
Posted by Paul W. Frields at Sun May 4 09:26:27 2008
You are SO the man. Great work on this utility, Luke!
Posted by Luis Vaca at Fri May 9 22:45:39 2008
Resseting the master boot is supposed to be done in version 2.1 of liveusb creator, yet I get the same error everytime "No bootable partition in table."
So what is next?
Posted by Johny Maul at Fri May 16 10:14:51 2008
Great thing i do not need to install system on every computer or run slow live CD
thx man
Posted by Steve S at Fri May 16 17:37:06 2008
Hi,
This is simply too awesome.
Is there any chance you could mmodify this to enable a fully encrypted installation?
Posted by Rahul Sundaram at Sat May 17 10:37:18 2008
The lifehacker article has a lot of comments and some of them point of things to improve. Also "persistent overlay" is a rather meaningless term for non-technical people. Might want to choose something easier to understand and explain it in a context sensitive help too.
Good work overall. I am waiting for a Linux GUI.
Posted by luke at Sat May 17 10:55:52 2008
suggestions for a better name than "persistent overlay" are welcome.
Posted by Stumblng Tumblr at Mon May 19 05:18:17 2008
The USB flash drive works perfectly in a computer whose BIOS I can change to boot from USB. However, I have another computer whose BIOS I can't change in that way. I'd like to be able to boot that computer from a floppy, which would then hand over to the USB flash drive.
Any suggestions as to how I'd do that, if it's possible?
Thanks.
Posted by Rahul Sundaram at Mon May 19 10:18:32 2008
Persistent storage or permanent storage seems to be better than "persistent overlay". Context sensitive help can explain the details further. You should note especially that both software changes as well as settings can be retained.
Posted by lewk at Mon May 19 15:08:35 2008
I think "persistent storage" would be a good change.
There is already help within the application that explains this feature further. Just click the question mark in the toolbar and then click the section that you want details on.
Posted by Rahul Sundaram at Mon May 19 15:39:09 2008
Others suggested:
Quote
"
* Writable Layer (this really isn't bad 'tall)
* System Change Layer
* Flexible Data Layer
* Recordable Layer (dangerously close to jargon collision, but does make good sense)"
</End Quote>
Posted by robert at Tue May 20 18:54:11 2008
at least 3 times i haved used this program and it has crashed on me, rendering the installation unable to boot at startup? whats the problem?
Posted by Scatter Computers at Wed May 21 00:42:31 2008
Great concept, but I had the CD, not the ISO. I made the CD into an ISO, but of course it didn't pass the SHA1 test so it refuses to make my Live USB. An option to ignore the SHA1 check would be a nice feature. I guess I'll have to download the ISO.
Posted by JorgeC at Tue May 27 15:34:41 2008
I agree with the rest of the comments here, this is cool!. Please keep improving it!
Posted by Shane Douglas at Fri Jun 6 00:55:38 2008
Wow its about time someone made it simple. Thank you fedora.
