SuSE on a USB stick.

FatRakoon · 3 Nov 2015 at 03:21

I have over the years, been throwing SuSE onto my setup to give various flavours a shot, however, while I can grab any distro and simply slap it onto a FlashDrive, and install it, I have always had a bit of a headache with suse in one way or another?

Is there any reasons behind this?

I mean, I have tried various Flash Drives. I personally prefer Verbatim, however, I have many different ones, PNY, HP, TDK, Toshiba, Lexar ( ack! ), Corsair, SanDisk, Kingston, and a few others, and they all work just fine with any other distro, but not with SuSE.
I have also tried a number of different programs to plonk the ISO image on as well, and sure, I have various levels of sucess with them, I have also tried various formats but tyhje program usually takes care of that of course!

Anyone have any thoughts on this?

Its not the image. as I said, its done this for years and only with SUSE.

Or, it may be the image, in that I seem to have better success with its the full on NON-LIVE install only version, and I get less success with a Live version, but still...

Erm... Help?

OhEsEcks · 3 Nov 2015 at 03:33

Have you tried writing the image to the disk from the command line with dd? It's the only way I write images and I've never had a problem. I have however had problems using GUI programs to write Fedora images in the past.

Edit: Also... when you say "live" are you talking about "live" live or "persistence" live. Live live being it just runs from the USB stick. Persistence means there's a partition created on the USB key that keeps settings and configurations you might set so that the next time you plug it in, it's the environment you were last running as opposed to just being the standard "live" live environment.

FatRakoon · 3 Nov 2015 at 04:19

In honesty, i have never tried dd. Never thought to try it tbh!
I have my ISOs on the windows pc so Ive just used that each time.
I will let you know how it goes tomorrow.

No... just the basic live image, not bothered with saving anything with these flash based live installs, however i have toyed with the idea, i just cannot be bothered in any serious sense.

OhEsEcks · 3 Nov 2015 at 04:59

In that case, try the dd method. This is how I will be burning Fedora 23 when it's released later today....

Format the USB. I use Disks on Gnome. Quick format, with no partition.

Download ISO image.

Issue the following command;

Code:

sudo dd if=~/Downloads/name-of-image.iso of=/dev/sdX bs=4M

Replace /dev/sdX with whatever mount point your USB stick is. Mine will be /dev/sdb. It's important you get the right mount point or you risk over-writing a disk or partition you didn't mean to.

The command line will appear to hang. But it's just writing the image to the USB. There's a command line tool pv that can be used to monitor the progress of the write. But I've never bothered with it since you need to install it and pipe it in between the if and of and all it does is provide a little indicator arrow to show progress. Depending on whether it's USB2 or USB3 and your CPU, it should take between 5 to 10 minutes to write. That's my experience writing Fedora 1GB+ images over USB3 to a USB3 stick, on a laptop with an i5-5200u.

FatRakoon · 3 Nov 2015 at 12:55

Thanks for the syntax.

I have just never even considered using Linux to make one thats all.

My main PC is still windows, and I use Linux purely because its not microsoft... Yeah, Im one of those people! LOL
But then I do also use it because I can get it to look and feel like my Atari Falcon and I like old school. ( Eve nthough newer KDE distros that I have been trying out now seem to have taken on the Windows 10 theme for some reason or other! ).

Anyway, thanks.