GUI Tab: Preparing the Medium

This tab presents the various possibilities for installing the live system that was built on the 'larchify' tab onto a bootable device, which can be in iso9660 form (to burn to a CD/DVD), or a partition on a hard disk or flash storage device. A suitable bootloader can also be installed.

Bootloader

The choice of GRUB and syslinux/isolinux is provided. It is also possible to edit their configuration files. In order to simplify switching from one to the other, I have separated out the actual boot lines into a separate file, that is automatically transformed into the appropriate format and included in the final configuration file.

Editing cd-root

This opens a file browser on the profile's cd-root directory. For details of the contents see Profiles.

Build an iso, for CD or DVD

It is possible to customize some of the information written to the iso by mkisofs, the text supplied to the '-A' option ('application ID') and to the '-publisher' option. One can also select the bootloader (GRUB or isolinux. The only option for medium detection is 'Search (for larchboot)', described below.

Install to partitition

Here one must select the partition to install to, and also select how the live initramfs is to find the correct partition. The available options are:

  • Partition: The device will be sought on the basis of its (current) device name - such as /dev/sdb1. This is only suitable if you can be sure the device will always get the same name (which - especially with pluggable devices - is unlikely).
  • UUID: Each device normally has a unique UUID, so this is a pretty reliable method. It's just that the UUIDs themselves are rather ungainly and unmemorable.
  • LABEL: Booting on the basis of the device label can be quite reliable and quite readable, so it might be a good compromise.
  • Search (for larchboot): The live initramfs tests all visible devices until it finds one containing the file larch/larchboot.

There is also a field to enter the device label for the selected partition. This normally has quite a limited maximum length (which I think may depend on the file-system type).

The choice of bootloader will determine the file-system with which the partition is formatted - for syslinux DOS is used, for GRUB ext2. No other file-system types are supported at present. There is also an option to install the live system without first formatting the partition. This might be useful in certain very special cases but it is generally not recommended.

With the button 'Enable session saving', you can determine whether the medium gets a file 'larch/save', which is needed to enable the session saving feature.

I'm not sure how useful the option 'Bootable via search' is. It is set automatically when the 'Search (for larchboot)' medium detection method is selected, but perhaps it is also useful in combination with the other methods.

Finally, there is the possibility of generating a boot CD for the live medium - this is to cover cases where a machine cannot boot from USB devices, but can boot from a CD. Just the kernel, initramfs and bootloader are put in the boot iso. The live system's initramfs will (hopefully) then be able to find the live medium. Note that the USB device for which the CD is to be generated must be plugged in (not mounted) and selected in the device chooser.