Benny Amorsen wrote:
"AC" == Alan Cox <alan redhat com> writes:AC> Today people still ship new laptops with CD-R/CD-RW drives. Lots AC> of them. You can't fit a $30 DVD reader to them. Is there a handy way to use a USB key for install? dd'ing boot.img works fine, but with today's large USB sticks, you might as well stick the DVD there too. But how?
Here is the relevant current link. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FedoraLiveCD/USBHowToBut there is a vast amount of work that can be done to improve the situation and provide more flexibility. I.e. on the simple end, would be turning the above process into an easy to use GUI. On the more complex end, you could do something like using grub2's loopback feature and modifications to the install DVD's initramfs, to support something more like what you were suggesting.
And on top of that, there are many, many other interesting theoretical options that can be explored. My personal favorite being a LiveUSB with multiple differing persistence images, each of which could be chosen to be rebootlessly installed...
-dmc