idea: fast install with dd
| Affects | Status | Importance | Assigned to | Milestone | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ubiquity (Ubuntu) |
New
|
Undecided
|
Unassigned | ||
Bug Description
as i see, ubuntu live cd system is almost same as the installed system. some differences are: other user name; other locale; gparted is not installed; bunch of some restricted software like mp3 is selected to install or not; gui language is selected; separate mount points and file systems for directories can be used upon installation. i usually use just one "/" partition and one swap and ext4 filesystem... as i know every package is copied, uncompressed and configured separately during installation. as i know, copying a partition (a whole file system) with dd is several times faster than copying data file by file, because disk head has not to move much. so, maybe you could just copy the whole file system of the running live cd, and then do some changes like renaming user, changing password, removing or installing mp3 etc, installing translation packages. i have now understood, that live cd filesystem is squashfs, it is different from ext4. but, i will report this "bug" anyway. maybe on the fly conversion from squashfs to ext4 is possible, or modify squashfs and get ext4 inside of squashfs. as i know, difference of ext4 file system depending on partition size is quite small, and file system can be growed quite fastly.
| dinar qurbanov (qdinar) wrote | #1 |
as i remember, i have seen something like this already in puppy linux: as i remember, it can copy the squashfs file onto hdd, and thus install it, and copying one large file must be also going much faster, than its contents copied file by file and configured etc.