torios team mailing list archive

[Nio Wiklund <nio.wiklund@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi toriosadores,

Debian and Ubuntu based ISO files contain read only ISO 9660 file
systems and make read-only systems in USB drives (as well as in CD/DVD
disks), when copied/flashed/cloned with mkusb. They need a tool, that
recognizes and picks the pieces and install them into another file
system (usually FAT32), and after that a casper-rw file or partition can
be created for persistence.

openSUSE comes with different ISO files for live systems. I have checked
and both of

openSUSE-13.1-GNOME-Live-i686.iso
openSUSE-13.2-KDE-Live-x86_64.iso

contain UDF file systems and create an ext3 'hybrid' read-write
partition for persistence automatically, when installed by mkusb into
USB drives. I guess it works also with read-write CD/DVD disks but I
have not tried that (I have never used such a disk).

So the openSUSE kind of live system will get persistence, when installed
with mkusb. This UDF system can be both an advantage and disadvantage.

+ It is very convenient to get persistence this way, and the success
rate making USB boot drives is higher than with other methods.

- You may not want persistence

. because it make the live session slower
. because you want to avoid the risk of virus or other malware

- There may be booting problems in very old computers, that might not
work with the UDF file system.

See the attached file, cut from the output of

sudo lsblk -fm

I think it can be worthwhile considering, not now, the 12.04 ISO file
should keep the ISO 9660 file system, but for a future release of
ToriOS, maybe '14.04'. Maybe it is fairly easy to borrow the technology
and replace the ISO file system with UDF and let the installer create a
partition for persistence, when the target drive can be written to.

Best regards
Nio

sdb     udf      openSUSE 13.1 GNOME Live 2013-11-06-16-04-23-00                           sdb       7.5G root  disk  brw-rw----
├─sdb1  udf      openSUSE 13.1 GNOME Live 2013-11-06-16-03-58-00               /livecd     ├─sdb1  910.2M root  disk  brw-rw----
└─sdb2  ext3     hybrid                   98aaa7f2-6f7e-4728-b937-d5fbf18639ab /read-write └─sdb2    6.6G root  disk  brw-rw----