how to make one bootable USB stick with OpenSolaris 2008.05

One of the nice things about OpenSolaris 2008.05 is that it is delivered as a bootable LiveCD. This means that you can try out the OS easily on your computer and see if it will work without risking the OS you are running on it now. Once you decide that all of the features and drivers work, it's a relatively easy task to do a complete install on your hard disk.

Since it's about 700MB, you can use a relatively cheap - almost free - 1GB USB stick or thumb drive to show somebody how wonderful OpenSolaris is.

I happened to come by a couple of USB sticks and decided to load up 2008.05 on them so they could be carried to a variety of machines and check out how 2008.05 works on them.

I had a little fun trying various tips from the web. Ashok sent me a link to James Liu's blog, and I tried this procedure. It seems to work, and I liked it because it unpacks the steps and let me see what is going on under the covers. One caveat with James' procedure: one of the steps that copies files onto the stick throws a few errors[1].

For a more automated method, try out this one from Dave Miner:

This works like a champ, though to be clear, there is one correction (which I found by reading the scripts):

# ./usbgen <path_to_iso_file> <path_to_usb_image> `pwd` <tmpdir>

This one seems to have gotten messed up in the HTML, or the usbgen script has changed. There are only 3 arguments to usbgen now. I would recommend specifying absolute pathnames for all three arguments, which you can do by prefacing the file names with the `pwd` method.

# ./usbcopy <path_to_usb_image>

Again, an absolute pathname works best here.

Anyway, this method seems to work well, and has very few manual steps. In fact, once you do the "usbgen" step, you can use usbcopy to create multiple sticks from that image. Nice!

The downside with this method is that you need to have the Mercurial tools installed (to do the "hg" command). Fortunately, I had a machine sitting around with all of this infrastructure set up and working. I suppose the other downside is that you need to run this from a Solaris or OpenSolaris machine, rather than from Windows.


Thanks Dave and James for writing this down. (And, since one of these USB sticks is going to my boss, I know he appreciates it too.)
[1] In the James Liu method, almost at the end, you run the following command:

# cp -rP@ .??* * /mnt/usbdrive

I got the following errors thrown from the cp command:

bin: failed to get acl entries: No such file or directory
 boot/solaris/bin/root_archive: failed to get acl entries: No such file or directory
 dev/nvidia0: failed to get acl entries: No such file or directory
 dev/nvidia1: failed to get acl entries: No such file or directory
 dev/nvidia2: failed to get acl entries: No such file or directory
 dev/nvidia3: failed to get acl entries: No such file or directory
 dev/nvidia4: failed to get acl entries: No such file or directory
 dev/nvidia5: failed to get acl entries: No such file or directory
 dev/nvidia6: failed to get acl entries: No such file or directory
 dev/nvidia7: failed to get acl entries: No such file or directory
 dev/nvidiactl: failed to get acl entries: No such file or directory
 dev/stderr: failed to get acl entries: No such file or directory
 dev/stdin: failed to get acl entries: No such file or directory
 dev/stdout: failed to get acl entries: No such file or directory

I'm not sure if these are fatal or not.

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OpenSolaris Developer Preview on USB flash drives

Thursday Nov 01, 2007

One of the things we developed between BeleniX and the Live Media project is the ability to run the live CD bits on USB flash drives, and indeed, that's what I mostly demo, because it's a lot faster (boot time is under a minute, install time for the OpenSolaris Developer Preview is about 7 minutes) - Jonathan loved it when we demo'ed it a couple of weeks ago. We don't push USB images yet because right now you need to already have Solaris installed in order to copy it to the USB stick. But if you do have Solaris Nevada (or have installed the preview!) already, and a copy of the preview ISO, you can make a USB flash drive for yourself, as follows:

Use mercurial to get a copy of the Distribution Constructor repository:

hg clone ssh://anon@hg.opensolaris.org/hg/caiman/distro_constructor

Go into the distro_constructor/tools directory and run usbgen, this will take roughly 10 minutes:

./usbgen <path_to_iso_file> <path_to_usb_image> `pwd` <tmpdir>

Plug your USB flash drive into the system, give the system a few seconds to see it, then run usbcopy, this will usually take 3-5 minutes, depending on your flash device; usbcopy will discover all your removable media and let you pick the right device:

./usbcopy <path_to_usb_image>

You'll need a 1 GB or larger USB flash device, since the image is 600+ MB.