Date: Sat, 15 Oct 2011 14:09:55 +0200
From: Natanael Copa <ncopa@alpinelinux.org>
To: Paul Onyschuk <blink@bojary.koba.pl>
Cc: alpine-devel@lists.alpinelinux.org
Subject: Re: [alpine-devel] USB creator for windows
Message-ID: <20111015140955.4cb65f55@alpinelinux.org>
In-Reply-To: <20111015122828.74ce3688.blink@bojary.koba.pl>
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	<20111015122828.74ce3688.blink@bojary.koba.pl>
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On Sat, 15 Oct 2011 12:28:28 +0200
Paul Onyschuk <blink@bojary.koba.pl> wrote:

> On Fri, 14 Oct 2011 13:27:00 +0200
> Natanael Copa <ncopa@alpinelinux.org> wrote:
> 
> > 
> > Would be nice to add Alpine Linux as an official[1] supported distro
> > for unetbootin. AFAIK there are no usb creators that has official
> > support for Alpine Linux.
> > 
> > Also, a gui for an alpine linux desktop would be nice, preferible
> > something that does not depend on qt.
> >
> 
> openSUSE uses some kind of trick in a way, that LiveCD ISO can be
> written to USB as raw image e.g. by dd tool (Image Writer can be used
> on Windows machines).  This is by far best and most flexible solution
> I'm aware of.
> 
> Still I don't know how they do that and how much work would be
> required to get this feature to Alpine Linux.

They probaly use isohybrid/syslinux. We talked about that for some time
ago. What i don't like with that approach is that:
1. you always loose all contents of your USB stick (users might want
save a stored apkovl)
2. we use FAT and fat cannot expand. So there will not be any (or fixed
only) size for saving other data on the USB.

Theoretically, what we have is pretty simple too:
1. unpack files from iso (7zip works)
2. make it bootable (run syslinux.exe and fdisk /mbr or dd mbr.bin)

We even have a uniso tool that is able to unpack the iso on the fly.
You can 'curl $url_to_iso | uniso' and at the time the iso is
downloaded the usb is done. setup-bootable in alpine uses this.

What I'm after is something like, instead of downloading Image Writer
and an alpine iso image you simple download a alpine-usb-creator tool
which downloads and creates the usb in one shot. It would also be nice
with a (gtk) gui for this in linux.

-nc


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