Bug 1358932

Summary:	How to create an USB stick with overlay persistence with graphical tools?
Product:	[Retired] Fedora Documentation	Reporter:	Răzvan Sandu <rsandu2004>
Component:	install-guide	Assignee:	Jaromir Hradilek <jhradile>
Status:	CLOSED EOL	QA Contact:	Fedora Docs QA <docs-qa>
Severity:	unspecified	Docs Contact:
Priority:	unspecified
Version:	devel	CC:	bkelly, bugzilla, pbokoc, zach
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Last Closed:	2024-05-21 09:21:52 UTC	Type:	Bug
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Description Răzvan Sandu 2016-07-21 19:43:40 UTC

Hello,


Description of problem:


The online guide at


https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/How_to_create_and_use_Live_USB#Data_persistence


which is installation-related, describes how to create a Fedora bootable USB stick using the graphical tool liveusb-creator with overlay persistence.

However, the current graphical tool available in Fedora (called "Fedora Media Writer") offers no obvious option (button, slider, etc.) for adding an overlay persistence space to the official .iso image.


Actual results:

The current graphical tool offers no option of adding overlay persistence to an .iso image that is written on an USB stick.

Expected results:

The tool should offer such an option, in order to easily create USB bootable sticks with persistence. The existing documentation should be consistent with the actual tool.


Additional info:

IMHO, adopting and documenting a STANDARD set of tools (graphical & CLI), as DISTRO-INDEPENDENT (cross-distro) as possible, for the (easy) creation of bootable USB sticks (including overlay) is the way to go.

Comment 2 Chris Murphy 2018-04-24 16:09:59 UTC

This isn't an install guide problem. This is a media writer feature request. It's also non-trivial as there's no livecd-tools integration in Media Writer, which also isn't portable anyway, and it requires some significant gymnastics to modify the partition map. The whole live boot with persistence needs a redesign and refactor to use either overlayfs or btrfs seed/sprout feature, so it just works out of the box and natively without complicated pieces that easily break.

Comment 3 Boyd 2018-04-30 09:50:56 UTC

Appreciate the comment and issue.  Just want to add that Fedora USB writer suppoted this in the past and that this is an important issue.  I would like to distribute for example a remix in West Africa.  Pelple here only have ancient windows pcs.  A bootable Fedora USB withh persistence would be awesome but.... 1)  There is no fedora gui to do this even on linux.  2)  Although it seems that Fedora Media Writer is available on Windows, I can't find a binary download anywhere.  3) Some other tools support persistence with Ubuntu, but if you select a Fedora iso the option is not available.  All of this puts Fedora at a disadvantage.  The media writer on Fedora should be widely available on Linux Windows and Mac.  It should support persistence.

Currently my workaround is to get my users to download Rufus and then manually copy a home.img file into the LiveOS folder.

Comment 4 Petr Bokoc 2024-05-21 09:21:52 UTC

The install guide has been retired, therefore I'm closing this bug. 

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