Package: debian-installer Severity: wishlist Hello,
As opposed to the optical disk images, the images that are provided for
installing Debian from an hd-media are not directly usable, but need to be
manually completed by adding an optical disk image into their filesystem.
This requires a more complicated procedure, and make the installation of Debian
from an USB key more complicated than from an optical disk, whereas there is no
theoretical reason for such a difference. Compare these two typical use cases:
(preparing an installation CD)
[optional: read the installation manual]
[find the URL of the CD image]
wget http://url/of/the/cd.iso
wodim dev=/dev/cdrom cd.iso
(preparing an installation USB drive)
[mandatory: read the installation manual]
[find the URL of the hd-media image]
wget http://url/of/the/hd-media.img.gz
[optional: try to write it directly, boot on that, fail]
gunzip hd-media.img.gz
dd if=hd-media.img of=/dev/stick
[optional: try to boot on that, fail]
[optional: give up and switch to the CD way]
[find the URL a small CD image]
wget http://url/of/the/cd.iso
mount /dev/stick /mnt
cp cd.iso /mnt
umount /mnt
The installation manual explains that in a non-straightforward way, describing
two methods, and giving only hints to find where to download the two needed
images. In addition, this procedure depends on *nix tools, and is thus
inapplicable for many user that start installing Debian from a foreign system,
which is a common case. Because of this complication, I see many beginners
failing at preparing installation USB sticks, if not failing to install Debian
at all because they do not have an optical drive.
It would be useful to build and provide ready-to-use hd-media images, that
would be as easy to use as the optical disk ones. I see four ways to implement
that:
1. work around: after building the incomplete hd-media image as it is
currently done, post-process it to add an optical disk image on its
filesystem;
2. hi-tech, space-saving: using the recent hybrid boot feature of SYSLINUX,
that allow to build single images that are bootable either as El Torito
optical media or as MBR on-optical media, if applicable to the Debian
installer: cf. bug #593484;
3. clean: find a way to build autonomous hd-media image, that use data on their
file system instead of relying on an optical disk image;
4. minimalistic: build hd-media image that use the netboot process, thus
containing only a bootloader, a kernel and an initrd: cd. bug #505773.
Regards,
--
Tanguy Ortolo
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