Elliot Peele - Foresight Installable Disk Image

11:50 pm - Foresight Installable Disk Image

Originally published at Elliot's Blog. You can comment here or there.

I spent a couple of days last week figuring out what it would take a make an installable USB key of Foresight Linux 2. I knew going in that Anaconda could handle installing from hard drive, but I wanted to make sure that the installer had the same sort of automated feel that it has when installing from CD (ie, no user interaction in the loader).

Through testing I found that hard drive install from USB mass storage needed a bit of work to get it like I wanted.

I noticed that when the loader asks for the device to install from it doesn’t always list the device that you want to install from. This is due to the fact that it takes a few seconds for usb devices to come up once the usb mass storage module is loaded. I have added a patch to the loader that waits for the USB bus to settle and automatically probes for a device to install from, which can be enabled by passing “method=hd:auto” on the kernel command line.

After fixing that I found that the source device was showing up during partitioning and bootloader configuration. Normally when installing from HD you might want to install from one partition on a device to another partition on the same device. However, this is not the case when installing from a USB key. So I added another option, “hidesrcdev”, that tells Anaconda to ignore the device that you are installing from.

Here is the first sample that I have put together if people would like to try it out:

http://people.rpath.com/~elliot/foresight-1.9.9.alpha4-x86.img.gz

To use this image you will need at least a 2GB USB mass storage device. Here are a few easy steps to get you started:

1. download
2. gunzip foresight-1.9.9.alpha4-x86.img.gz
3. dd if=foresight-1.9.9.alpha4-x86.img of=/dev/sdb (substitute your usb device for sdb) Be warned that this will overwrite any data that is on the USB device.

If you have any questions or comments feel free to ask.