Starting live session from usb stick is very slow

[Albert Damen]

Binary package hint: usb-creator

Starting a live session from a usb stick created with usb-creator took 7.5 minutes to start. At first it looked like it would not start at all, as it took 4 minutes before the Kubuntu boot splash screen was shown. All that time the first options screen from the live cd was shown. Starting a session via text mode (option F6, <esc>) showed vmlinuz and initrd were loading very slowly.
As I had much better experience with a manually created live usb stick, I searched for the difference and found it in the syslinux call. My manual usb stick recipe [1] uses syslinux -f, usb-creator uses syslinux -s.
man syslinux says for -s: Install a "safe, slow and stupid" version of syslinux. On my system, an eeepc 4G, that is apparently very true.
Changing the syslinux call to syslinux -f, I got a usb stick that booted to the desktop in slightly more then 3 minutes.

If there is a real need to use -s as default option, I would suggest to add an option to use syslinux without -s to usb-creator.

I tested with Kubuntu intrepid i386 Alpha6

[1]: http://www.debuntu.org/how-to-install-ubuntu-linux-on-usb-bar

usb-creator:
  Installed: 0.1.4
  Candidate: 0.1.4
  Version table:
 *** 0.1.4 0
        500 http://127.0.0.1 intrepid/universe Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

This bug was fixed in the package usb-creator - 0.1.5

---------------
usb-creator (0.1.5) intrepid; urgency=low

  * Add --safe option to enable syslinux's 'safe, slow, and stupid' mode
    (LP: #273740).
  * Fix cases where free_space gets called after we've unmounted filesystems
    as part of the shutdown process (LP: #273861).
  * Lower debhelper requirement for Hardy backport (LP: #273936).
  * Update percentage by bytes, not files copied (LP: #269037).
  * Remove files and directories that we're going to write to beforehand.
  * Notify the user that they need to insert an USB stick when none are
    available (LP: #267794).

 -- Evan Dandrea <email address hidden> Thu, 25 Sep 2008 02:04:47 -0400