As of tomorrow's daily builds, all Oneiric amd64 and i386 CD images on cdimage.ubuntu.com can also be written directly to a USB device. You can still use usb-creator if you need to enable persistent storage on the USB stick, but if all you need is to install from the stick then this simplifies the process.
There is a small size cost to this feature; part of this is partition alignment to 1MB "cylinders" (since the image now has to simultaneously look like a CD and a partitioned USB disk), and part of it is a second directory tree whose size is roughly proportional to the number of files in the image. On the server CD (and probably the alternate CD too, though I haven't measured that), this came out to about 5MB, but as luck would have it I found a way to save about the same amount by hardlinking some files together, so the size there stays roughly the same. On the desktop CD, unfortunately, we lose about 1MB (although I consider myself to have "paid" for this by way of the 2MB or so we gained by switching to live-build ...). If this becomes a problem close to release time, then we may be able to shave off a bit at the possible cost of some USB-booting compatibility on a few machines by dropping the 1MB alignment. See the recent thread on pkg-libburnia-devel for details. I realise that we're behind a number of other major distributions on this. The delay was because (like Debian) we couldn't simply use isohybrid because that would break jigdo downloads, so we had to switch to xorriso as the CD image generator on these architectures for its new JTE support, and by the time all that landed in Debian I didn't really want to cram it into 11.04. See http://blog.einval.com/2011/01/07#isohybrid_CDs for the gory details, and thanks a lot to Steve, Thomas, and George for their hard work on that. Please file bugs on https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu-cdimage if this change causes the image to stop working on machines where it previously worked. Cheers, -- Colin Watson [[email protected]] -- ubuntu-devel mailing list [email protected] Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel
