make information for installing Ubuntu from a USB flash drive easily accessible

[Alexander van Loon]

On Sun, 2008-04-27 at 13:41 +0200, Alexander van Loon wrote:
> On Sun, 2008-04-20 at 11:29 +0200, Paulus Esterhazy wrote:
> > I agree that this is important. Installation from USB pen drives has
> > been a curiously neglected installation method, given that it doesn't
> > require a blank cd, or an optical drive (think small notebooks).
> > 
> > There is a nasty bug in gutsy that causes the installer (ubiquity) to
> > leave bogus lines in /etc/fstab. The installer evidently thinks that
> > it's installing from a regular CD drive, and adds a line containing
> > the
> > USB disk's device (say, sdc) and the specified file system iso9660 to
> > the fstab. If you subsequently plug in a pen drive, GNOME mount tells
> > you that there is an "invalid mount option", as the cdrom mount
> > options
> > don't fit together with mounting a usb stick. Forums are teeming with
> > reports of this bug.
> > 
> > I couldn't find out if this is still present in hardy. This report
> > seems
> > similar, and it hasn't received much attention:
> > 
> > https://launchpad.net/bugs/150872
> > 
> > Thanks,
> > Paulus
> 
> I haven't experienced it yet because I haven't attempted to actually
> install from a USB flash drive yet, I just tried if I could get my USB
> flash drive and Ubuntu on it to boot. I will try it within a few days
> however, and report if I'm affected by that bug. Thanks for mentioning
> this.

I recently tried to install Ubuntu on a PC from a USB flash drive. I
haven't experienced the bug, because I wasn't able to complete the
installation. When I started the installation and arrived at the part
where the file systems and partitions are created on the hard disk
drive, 

I received an error message that the swap partition couldn't be mounted
at 'none'. Before I started the installation, the hard disk drive was
completely formatted and didn't have any partitions. When I tried to
install from a CD on the same PC right after the installation from the
USB flash drive didn't work, everything went fine without an error
message.

So apparently I've encountered another bug, but unfortunately I don't
have a spare PC anymore on which I can try to reproduce it, so filing a
bug report on Launchpad probably wouldn't be useful.