Making a Xerus LiveUSB stick from hybrid ISO

[GreyGeek]

I found and downloaded the "Ubuntu Installation Guide" for Xerus i386 (lost the link, sorry).
It mentions a way to make a USB install stick from a hybrid ISO that I had never done or
even heard of before: using the cp and sync commands.

[B]4.3.1. Preparing a USB stick using a hybrid CD or DVD image[/B]

Ubuntu CD and DVD images can now be written directly to a USB stick, which is a very easy way to
make a bootable USB stick. Simply choose a CD or DVD image that will fit on your USB stick. See
Section 4.1 to get a CD or DVD image.


Alternatively, for very small USB sticks, only a few megabytes in size, you can download the
mini.iso image from the netboot directory (at the location mentioned in Section 4.2.1).
The CD or DVD image you choose should be written directly to the USB stick, overwriting its current
contents. For example, when using an existing GNU/Linux system, the CD or DVD image file can be
written to a USB stick as follows, after having made sure that the stick is unmounted:[INDENT][B]# cp xenial-desktop-amd64.iso /dev/sdX[/B][/INDENT][INDENT][B]# sync[/B][/INDENT]

The win32diskimager (http://sf.net/projects/win32diskimager/) utility can be used under other oper-
ating systems to copy the image.


Important: The image must be written to the whole-disk device and not a partition, e.g. /dev/sdb
and not /dev/sdb1. [B]Do not use tools like unetbootin which alter the image[/B].


Important: Simply writing the CD or DVD image to USB like this should work fine for most users.
The other options below are more complex, mainly for people with specialised needs.


The hybrid image on the stick does not occupy all the storage space, so it may be worth considering using the free space to hold firmware files or packages or any other files of your choice. This could be useful if you have only one stick or just want to keep everything you need on one device.


Create a second, FAT partition on the stick (sdX2 because system is on sdX1),  mount the partition and  copy or unpack the firmware onto it. For example, to add some firmware to the LiveUSB:[INDENT][B]# mount /dev/sdX2 /mnt[/B][/INDENT][INDENT][B]# cd /mnt[/B][/INDENT][INDENT][B]# tar zxvf /path/to/firmware.tar.gz[/B][/INDENT][INDENT][B]# cd /[/B][/INDENT][INDENT][B]# umount /mnt[/B][/INDENT]

The use of "cp" and "sync" will work on a Kubuntu Xerus ISO because Ubuntu CD images are "isohybrid" images that can boot both from CD and from USB drives.

The usually procedure, using StartDiskCreator, offers used to offer the opportunity to burn a standard ISO file to the USB stick and in addition to allow the unused extra space to be used to download and store apps while running live. If the LiveUSB is later used to install the distro those downloaded apps will be available after the install.

The standard installation guide for Xerus is here