CDs DVDs or netboot. Oh my!

[Douglas McClendon]

Benny Amorsen wrote:
>>>>>> "AC" == Alan Cox <alan at 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/USBHowTo

But 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