Sugar on a Stick/Linux

Introduction

This page is designed to help you to put your Sugar on a Stick image under Linux on a thumbdrive. If you have questions, trouble or feedback, please let us know on the SoaS talk page. If you can improve these instructions, please edit the page and do so!

Linux instructions

This is known to work in Fedora and Ubuntu 8.10 and should work in other Linux distributions.

• Make sure you have the isomd5sum and cryptsetup packages installed in your distribution, as they will be needed by the installation script.

  (These packages are needed for the verification and persistent home folder options of the installation script; they are not necessary if one applies the --noverify and --unencrypted-home options, respectively. The verification step checks that the file is complete after its travels, and it will signal a failure warning if there is a problem.) The --unencrypted-home option may be preferred for improved robustness with the compressed file system employed by the LiveUSB deployment.

• Plug in a 1GB or larger USB stick into your computer.
• Download the installation script: http://people.sugarlabs.org/sdz/livecd-iso-to-disk.sh
• Check the USB device. In the example below the device is /dev/sdb:

df -h

Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1              19G  7.0G   11G  40% /
tmpfs                 1.5G     0  1.5G   0% /lib/init/rw
varrun                1.5G   96K  1.5G   1% /var/run
varlock               1.5G     0  1.5G   0% /var/lock
udev                  1.5G  2.9M  1.5G   1% /dev
tmpfs                 1.5G  104K  1.5G   1% /dev/shm
lrm                   1.5G  2.0M  1.5G   1% /lib/modules/2.6.27-11-generic/volatile
/dev/sdb1             996M  913M   84M  92% /mnt/myUSBdisc

• Then check to see that the partition is marked as bootable,
  

sudo fdisk -l <----that's a lowercase letter L for the List option.

You should see output that looks like this:

Disk /dev/sdb: 1047 MB, 1047265280 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 127 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x0008325f
. 
 Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sdb1   *           1         127     1020096    6  FAT16

The '*' under the Boot column is what you want to see.

If not, then

• For Ubuntu 8.10, menu: System -> Administration -> Partition Editor (GParted).

1. Select your USB device (/dev/sdb in your case),
2. then your partition (/dev/sdb1),
3. then menu: Partition -> Manage Flags,
4. check the boot box,
5. and Close to mark the partition as bootable.

• For Fedora,

1. parted /dev/sdb
2. toggle 1 boot
3. quit

• Also, check to see that you do not already have an existing bootloader (such as GRUB) in the MBR of your stick. If you have not previously used this stick as a live boot, you can skip this step.

1. TODO: instructions.

• Unmount the drive,
  

sudo umount /dev/sdb1

• Change mode to make the script executable.

chmod +x livecd-iso-to-disk.sh

• Run it as root, making sure to pass the correct USB device and to set overlay and home size appropriately, depending on the stick size.

 sudo ./livecd-iso-to-disk.sh --overlay-size-mb 300 --home-size-mb 160 --delete-home --unencrypted-home soas-beta.iso /dev/sdb1

The Linux installation has the advantage of allowing a persistent /home/liveuser folder with the --home-size-mb NNN option. This feature would allow you to update the OS image while keeping the user files (by running the script against your existing installation but leaving out the --home-size-mb NNN option).

• The --unencrypted-home option prevents password protection and encryption of the /home/liveuser folder. This releaves overhead on the compressed sqaushfs, and should be more robust to file system failures (outside of security).
• The --delete-home option is used to avoid an error message while requesting both a new home (with --home-size-mb) and a persistent home (indirectly with --unencrypted-home). You wouldn't use the --delete-home option on an upgrade of the operation system only.

Depending on the size of your usb stick, you may have to decrease --overlay-size-mb and --home-size-mb values (example, for 1 GB stick, use 200 for each).

Alternative instructions

UNetbootin (Universal Netboot Installer) is a cross-platform utility that can create Live USB systems.

Keep in mind that UNetbootin doesn't support persistent overlays, so you won't be able to save files using the Journal.

http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/

• Choose the Diskimage ISO option.
• Select the downloaded .iso image file.
• Press OK and wait for your USB stick to be created.

What's next?

After you've created your stick, it's time to boot your stick and test it out.