LWN: Comments on "Liberté Linux 2010.1"

Liberté Linux 2010.1

loevborg — Tue, 23 Nov 2010 14:17:50 +0000

Thanks for the additional comments.

Liberté Linux 2010.1

liberte — Mon, 22 Nov 2010 18:38:00 +0000

The first release of Liberté (2010.0, this one is actually the second release) used GRUB Legacy, and correct installation was a nightmare from the maintenance point of view. You can see for yourself here:
https://liberte.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/liberte/tags/...

Liberté had to be installed on a separate partition, which had to be the second one (Windows sees only the first partition on removable disks). I don't think that there is a relatively easy way to accomplish such an installation from Windows.

Syslinux, on the other hand, allows the distribution to be a simple directory on FAT/FAT32-formatted disk, and provides installers for both Linux and Windows the installer just modifies the boot sector to load ldlinux.sys, and possibly also modifies the MBR if the installation is to a partition.

I think that UNetbootin (which I understand is essentially a wrapper around ISOs) is an unnecessary layer that complicates things.

By the way, I think that for LiveCDs (as opposed to LiveUSBs), GRUB and Syslinux are equally simple to install and to use, but I only tried GRUB LiveCD support was removed from Liberté Linux before the transition to Syslinux.

Liberté Linux 2010.1

loevborg — Mon, 22 Nov 2010 14:59:21 +0000

From the installation instructions:

1. Download liberte-201X.Y.zip from the SourceForge project site.

2. Extract the archive into the root folder of the media you want to use.

To make the media bootable:

3. (Windows) In liberte folder, launch setup.bat. You probably need to right-click and select Run as administrator in Vista and in Windows 7 read the console messages. (Linux) Copy liberte/setup.sh to a local directory, and run setup.sh /dev/XXX as root providing the (unmounted) media to which you extracted the archive as the argument. Syslinux (and GNU Parted if /dev/XXX is a partition) must be installed.

I wish Ubuntu would put its live media contents into a single folder as well, on a CD as well as on a USB stick. That makes it less scary than an arcane assortment of SYSLINUX.XYZ and CASPAR directory entries. Also supplying a setup.sh is sensible. We could even introduce a cross-distro convention how the layout of a Linux live USB stick should look like. Much better than the current state of affairs, which amounts to semin-reliable unetbootin, usb-creator and friends. The layout might be:

/ubuntu-10.04-live/live.ini
/ubuntu-10.04-live/linux
/ubuntu-10.04-live/initrd
/ubuntu-10.04-live/data
/fedora-14-live/live.ini
...

On boot, SYSLINUX or GRUB, which is installed with a single click by some program like usb-creator, would present the user with a choice of which directory (containing a live.ini) to base the boot on.