Ubuntu's Live USB Disk Creator

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Ubuntu's Live USB Disk Creator

Ubuntu 8.10 is shipping next week with a horde of updated packages including the Linux 2.6.27 kernel, X.Org 7.4, Pidgin 2.5, GIMP 2.6, and many other packages that have experienced significant milestones since the April release of Ubuntu 8.04. On top of these updated packages from the community, Canonical has been working on a few desktop Linux innovations of their own. For instance, arriving late into the Intrepid Ibex release cycle is a USB start-up disk creator. In this article we are providing a quick look at this utility to easily spin your own USB disk images.

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=13004

[Vadi]

Is there a version in C? Is there a Qt frontend? Who did they steal it from?

(did I cover everything?)

[Kano]

It is not really hard to do that manually, btw. since the network-manager bug is solved you can even boot the live images again over network. All you need to do is to boot the kernel/initrd and it is possible to specify the position of the casper sub dir. Not fully customizeable like the more advanced debian live variant (live-initramfs is basically casper with extra options) but there is nothing special to boot from usb. Even Kanotix can be booted without problems from USB - one thing you really should have got is possibility to fix the grub hd to device mapping before install (to fix device.map) in order to install the grub loader to the correct postition. I highly doubt that U has that feature - Kanotix has - and allows not even Live mode from usb but even direct hd install in advanced mode.

[kimble85]

Can I get this tool for 8.04? I don't see any point in installing 8.10 in order to create an USB install medium for 8.10.

[Yfrwlf]

...use UNetbootin.

You can install to a drive over USB or partition.

But it's great there's another alternative for USB mem stick installer creator thingies. :P

[chaos386]

How much space does it take up on the USB drive? Would a 1 GB stick be enough for a 700 MB .iso?

[bugmenot]

Originally Posted by Yfrwlf

...use UNetbootin...

It would be good to see a cpmparison of the Canonical version versus others.

I believe Fedora also has a similar thing too since a couple of versions ago, but I think it is only for Live USB's.

[curaga]

What's to compare?

They all do the same thing, perhaps this Ubuntu one adds a different boot option for the persistency.

[deanjo]

openSUSE offers a nice little YaST module for creating USB installs and it allows custom package selection with the option to install to HD if desired from it.

[Yfrwlf]

Originally Posted by deanjo

openSUSE offers a nice little YaST module for creating USB installs and it allows custom package selection with the option to install to HD if desired from it.

UNetbootin offers a straight binary as well as Ubuntu and openSuse packages, so it's cross distro without requiring users to compile. Does the YaST one do that? Huh huh huh?

Oh, and did I mention UNetbootin can do any distro? Can the Ubuntu or Suse ones do any distro you want?

Oh snap. UNetbootin = 2. Others = ?

There's your comparison, bugmenot, though it's not much of one because as you can see, I only compared two categories, software accessibility and multi-distro boot creation, and I didn't even know the outcome for it.