Can't sudo in Karmic image made via usb-creator (plus many other problems)

[Grondr]

Binary package hint: usb-creator

usb-creator needs some serious QA. Here's a laundry list of bugs that have made it almost unusable for me. (I was running it under an up-to-date Karmic amd64 on a desktop, trying to create an i386 image for a ThinkPad whose CDROM drive is too flaky to use).

(a) Most critical: Handing usb-creator the Karmic i386 LiveCD as the image to install to the USB stick gives me a system which CANNOT BE SUDOED. Unlike the -real- LiveCD, the resulting USB image asks for a password when I type sudo as the LiveCD user (and guessing "ubuntu" didn't work, either). Adding a new (real) user doesn't work, either, since presumably only the ubuntu user is the "first" user and winds up in /etc/sudoers. Since I can't get privs in this image, I can't even see how /etc/sudoers was writtten, but I'm guessing that somehow the ubuntu user didn't wind up in any admin groups, so sudo won't let it get privs. This makes the entire point of creating a USB image pointless, since I can't install anything (or do much of anything else) without being able to sudo. (I -might- be able to do an install onto the target machine's disk with this image, but I didn't -want- to install---I needed to do some poking around -as root- without bashing the existing disk.) [My workaround: use the Karmic amd64 usb-creator but hand it the i386 image from 9.04 instead of 9.10. -That- gave me a USB image in which sudo worked.]

(b) Very, -very- flaky behavior when trying to reformat, and very confusing displays---the USB stick showed both sdd and sdd1 as possible targets, but clicking "Format" on either one most often appeared to do -nothing-. (Plugging & unplugging the USB stick didn't seem to change things either way.) It was a real crapshoot how many times I'd have to try on either sdd or sdd1 until it managed to actually notice that I was trying to format and updated to the point where "Make Startup Disk" un-grayed. It's also not at all obvious to a random user whether they -should - be trying to format sdd or should only be formatting sdd1; e.g., I presume that sdd is the wrong choice since using the whole USB stick gives no place to put grub, but this should be called out if so. -And- the default height of the window displays about 1.5 lines of the two partitions, so in the most common case (a USB stick that originally had a single Windows FAT partition on it), it looks crappy and it's hard to read. There's plenty of whitespace in that window (you could close up a line between the first "Other..." button and "Disk to use:"), so using 1.5 lines and a scrollbar to show the most common case (two choices) looks unprofessional.

Note also that, after I'd tried to create that Karmic image the first time, it then took -20 minutes- to boot because of bug #500822. And after wasting all that time (and only after searching the web told me that it -would- eventually finish booting, so really that boot took quite a bit longer than 20 minutes because I was doing research & trying other things), I discovered that that I couldn't sudo.

The 9.04 image, on the other hand, -also- takes about 20 minutes to boot, because of incessant LVM attempts on /dev/fd0, as mentioned in http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1163250. But at least I can sudo in it. Since that only occurred in the 9.04 image, I presume that the bug of constantly trying to talk to the (nonexistent) floppy drive did get fixed.

In addition, if, in -either- image created on the USB stick, I try the "Check Integrity" option instead of either booting or doing a RAM test, the check-integrity process has -no progress bar-, so I'm just left to guess how long it'll take to finish. (In both the 9.10 and 9.04 cases, check-integrity -did- eventually finish and found no errors.)

The sum total of all this seems to indicate that usb-creator has needed some serious QA for a couple of releases now, given that -both- of the most-recent releases created images that took 20+ minutes to boot, and the most-recent release creates one that is -also- unusable because sudo won't work. It turned a simple task that should have taken half an hour into one that took an entire afternoon.

[komputes (komputes)]

Hey Gondr,

I have adopted the usb-creator package and am pushing for a better list of QA testcases - http://testcases.qa.ubuntu.com/Applications/StartupDiskCreator

As you can see in https://wiki.ubuntu.com/komputes/TopBugs I am trying to get usb-creator working well for Lucid. The points you bring up are valid, yet you seem to have entered multiple issues in one bug. I have separated these below.

(a) I've experienced this, the password is enter (no charachters, just press enter). Unfortunately once the LiveCD is out there's no fixing it until the next release.

(b)
-Showing /dev/sdb/ & /dev/sdb1 instead of the drive name (like in previous releases) is Bug #506586
-Format does nothing is Bug #457737
-/init: line 7: can't open /dev/sr0: No medium found is Bug #500822

I suggest you mark these bugs as affecting you and subscribe to them. If I have missed any issues you reported in this bug or if you would like to discuss issues with usb-creator further, please let me know. Cheers.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for usb-creator (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]