Portal:KIWI/FAQ/19
TIP: Hybrid Live Systems
( from http://lizards.opensuse.org/2009/08/05/hybrid-live-systems/ by marcus )
When talking about live systems on USB sticks people reported many problems with bootloaders like grub to boot the stick. Even though this is most often a problem with the stick hardware or the PC BIOS itâs an annoying situation which should have a better solution. There are also many people who wants to use the stick as a data container in combination with a live system to work with
With the ISO hybrid technology and the integration into kiwi there is a way to create such a stick very easily. A hybrid ISO is an iso filesystem which contains a MBR and thus itâs seen as a disk to the PC BIOS. As itâs an ISO the isolinux bootloader is used instead of grub which works better on many systems. Additionally the hybrid ISO can be used as a live system on CD/DVD as well as on a USB stick.
Whatâs required to use this
* kiwi v3.68 or later * syslinux-3.82-2.1 or later
How do I setup a hybrid ISO in kiwi
In order to activate the creation of a hybrid iso in kiwi you only have to add the hybrid=âtrueâ attribute as part of your iso image type in config.xml:
<type boot="isoboot/suse-11.2" flags="clic" hybrid="true">iso
You can use the suse-11.2-JeOS from the kiwi-templates package as example image description for your hybrid testing. The generated .iso file can be dumped via a simple dd call onto the USB stick. The same file also can be used to be burned on a CD/DVD
dd if=LimeJeOS-openSUSE-11.2.i686-1.11.2.iso of=/dev/... bs=32k
After that the stick can be tested. By default all attempts to write data will go into the RAM of the system. As a stick allows storing data persistently you can create a write partition on the stick using fdisk:
fdisk /dev/...
kiwi will prevent using a vfat partition for the operating system. So make sure you create a 0Ă83 (linux) type partition and not a vfat partition for the write support. If you additionally create a vfat partition you can use it as a container for any kind of data independently from the live system. We choose vfat here to stay compatible with Windows systems.
Known bugs
- when using the clicfs filesystem (flags=âclicâ) the persistently write feature into a single partition will fail because clicfs currently canât deal with raw block specials as cow device. Will be fixed as soon as possible
Have fun :-)