convenient support for live CDs images in /boot

[Andrew Clausen]

Binary package hint: grub

I'm not sure where to send this... this is a patch to add live CDs in /boot to the grub boot menu. I think this patch is important to the Ubuntu community, because it makes it easy to test new Ubuntu versions, and hence report bugs.

To use this patch, put the attached file, called "50_casper" in /etc/grub.d

Then, you can use it to boot of ISO images in /boot as follows:
 * save the ISO image in /boot
 * run "sudo update-grub"
 * the ISO image will now be in your boot menu... you can select it to boot from it.

[Michael Casadevall (mcasadevall)]

This doesn't look like a patch against grub specifically, it looks like a helper script that simply adds a the CD-ROM drive, and doesn't touch the package directly. That being said, having an ability to directly boot ISOs without having to burn them seems like an exceeding useful thing to have during image testing.

I'm marking this bug Invalid, but I highly recommend you follow up with the Ubuntu QA Team on their mailing list (https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-qa), or on Freenode (channel #ubuntu-quality) who will work with you to include your script with the Ubuntu QA tools.

[Michael Casadevall (mcasadevall)]

After a quick discussion, I'm reopening this bug and reassigning to ubuntu-qa-tools.

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

If we take this, I'd much rather have it in grub2 than in ubuntu-qa-tools. Reassigning back.

[Jan Claeys (janc)]

Some remarks:
- on many systems /boot is (on) a rather small partition, while iso-images tend to be large; maybe there should be some way to configure the location of the iso images to include?
- why do you use "ls *iso" instead of "ls *.iso"?
- removing the mnt directory at the end is probably wrong, you should only do that if the script created it (and even then it's not really needed IMO)

[Marcus Tomlinson (marcustomlinson)]

This release of Ubuntu is no longer receiving maintenance updates. If this is still an issue on a maintained version of Ubuntu please let us know.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for grub2 (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]