Bootable USB stick

[OneLine]

With the 'buntu 13.10 alpha 1.

One way to do it

Using the minimal iso 13.10 /1/ to make a bootable usb stick with the KDE plasma desktop. Ubuntu Installation guide /3/.


1) Partitioning a 4 GB USB stick

With the KDE partition manager:

- 3 GB Root
- 1 GB Home



2) Boot with the minimal CD (usb or CD)

Booting with the minimal CD - it can be installed to the USB stick. Plugging the partitioned usb stick to the another port and configuring the partitions and mount points.



Installing only the core system - the Kubuntu desktop doesn't fit to the 3 Gb.


The image is from an earlier experiment /2/.

The 'buntu core will take about 0.9 GB.




3) Booting with the USB stick and installing the KDE desktop

Booting with the core Ubuntu USB stick and installing the KDE desktop:

Log of sudo apt-get install kde-runtime plasma-desktop kde-workspace kde-baseapps udisks upower xserver-xorg
Sat Jul 6 21:36:02 2013

...
0 upgraded, 549 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 216 MB of archives.
After this operation, 702 MB of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue [Y/n]?

and few additional packages

+ xinit
+ ksnapshot


4) Starting the KDE desktop

After the installation is done the KDE desktop can be started with the command:

startx

...and the KDE Plasma desktop is there



There is about 0.7 GB left for the additional packages.






Links

1. https://help.ubuntu.com/community/In...tion/MinimalCD

2. http://www.kubuntuforums.net/showthr...t-Installation

3. https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation

[SteveRiley]

Alas, the mini.iso sill lacks the necessary files to boot a machine into UEFI mode, meaning that you can't complete a UEFI install this way. So sad.

[kubicle]

Alas, the mini.iso sill lacks the necessary files to boot a machine into UEFI mode, meaning that you can't complete a UEFI install this way. So sad.

Can you elaborate what's needed for UEFI (I'm not really familiar with it)?

Can you install support for it afterwards by booting the usb disk (on non-UEFI machine) or chrooting into the USB-disk from an UEFI machine (if you don't have a non-UEFI machine at hand).

[SteveRiley]

Can you elaborate what's needed for UEFI (I'm not really familiar with it)?

UEFI mode can be started in one of two ways:

* An NVRAM variable in the UEFI points to an EFI boot loader named in the variable
* The file \EFI\BOOT\bootx64.efi exists on an EFI system partition, formatted FAT-32, on a GPT disk

NVRAM variables exist only for installed operating systems that have been placed to nonremovable media. You will not have such a variable for a bootable installation USB, so the only mechanism we have for booting into UEFI mode that way is to plcae the bootloader in the proper location.

Here's an ISO for Saucy. Notice that it satisfies the second condition above. (Ubuntu's installer bootloader is in two parts: bootx64.efi chains to grubx64.efi someplace along the way.)



Here's the mini.iso. It's missing the UEFI bootloader.



Machines booted with that ISO will fall back to BIOS, if compatibility mode is enabled. If it's disabled, they won't boot.

Can you install support for it afterwards by booting the usb disk (on non-UEFI machine) or chrooting into the USB-disk from an UEFI machine (if you don't have a non-UEFI machine at hand).

Yes. Google will show you numerous examples of converting a BIOS installation to UEFI. You could use such a framework to accomplish the same thing on a chrooted USB I'd imagine. I haven't tried it myself. Remember that the disk must be GPT (not MBR), the partition must be FAT-32, and the partition type must be EF00.

[kubicle]

Thanks for the details

Machines booted with that ISO will fall back to BIOS, if compatibility mode is enabled. If it's disabled, they won't boot.

So that means that the mini.iso itself doesn't support UEFI booting (an issue by itself)? Does that extend to the installed system? That is, you can't install an UEFI enabled system with the mini.iso?

[SteveRiley]

To install a system that runs in UEFI mode requires that you boot the installation media in UEFI mode. Because the mini.iso lacks the proper files, that's not an option. One could always convert a completed BIOS mode install to UEFI, however.