Installing drivers on USB sticks

[Scott Kitterman]

On Tuesday, January 04, 2011 05:08:28 pm Brian Murray wrote:
> I've recently discovered hundreds of bug reports regarding people trying
> to install drivers (bcmwl, fglrx, nvidia) on their Live USB version of
> Ubuntu and it failing[1].  Part of the large volume is due to the fact
> that the bug reports are automatically reported by apport as package
> installation failures.  When looking at these bug reports I had a couple
> of questions.
> 
> Is installing drivers on a Live USB version of Ubuntu something that is
> supported?
> 
> It seems to me that there are a lot of people who think it should be and
> I believe it would a useful way for people to test the development
> release of Ubuntu and the latest drivers.  If it isn't though we should
> stop the automatic reporting of this classification of bug reports[2].
> 
> There are also some bug reports[3] that have empty
> DpkgTerminalLog.txt[4] attachments.
> 
> How did this happen and can it be fixed?
> 
> Can these be marked as duplicates of bug 557023? (Provided they are on
> live media and about installing drivers of course.)
> 
> 
> [1] http://launchpad.net/bugs/557023
> [2] I've written bug patterns for a couple of packages for this
> [3] http://launchpad.net/bugs/696656
> [4] http://launchpadlibrarian.net/61549804/DpkgTerminalLog.txt
> 
> Thanks,

I've done this successfully with bcmwl on my Dell Mini 10v a few times with 
Lucid and probably close to a dozen times with Maverick (including while 
sitting in a UDS plenary when I messed up my system and was trying to get back 
to something usable).  I understand that video support might be hard, but I 
think that in many cases you need to network to fix things so supporting 
wireless drivers is an important use case.

Scott K