Installing drivers on USB sticks

[komputes]

On 01/04/2011 05:08 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,

Hi Brian,

I often use full installations on USB keys.

My original reason for doing this was because I was going to stores and
looking at different hardware under Ubuntu to see what works. I was
visiting friends and testing hardware compatability on their laptops. I
was submitting checkbox results for machines so that they may feed the
Hardware Database.

Should this use case be supported? I would think so. Since the modules
needed load when the appropriate hardware is detected I think it should
be supported. I did a little research on additional drivers that don't
come with/in the Linux kernel and posted them.
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1329514


Note that I have had problems in the past with these keys. Once such
problem occured after using a USB stick from a computer using NVIDIA
video to a computer using INTEL video. Once gnome-session starts the
background and gnome-panel items and letters were reversed upside-down.
I would have thought that's X.org would autodetect hardware before
setting up the video server.
http://pad.lv/544813

There are two other issues that come to mind with this setup:
(Regression) This was fixed and re-appeared. When selecting to install
to a USB key in Ubiquity, the installer installs MBR to sda (usb key
being sdb).
http://pad.lv/549756

When ubiquity makes decisions on what it will install based on the
hardware you are running the installer on (e.g. 4GB RAM + Net =
PAE-enabled kernel)
No bug reported for this. Detecting hardware in the installer seems like
a new feature.

I'm able to assist with testing and feedback should you require
assistance with this important effort to support this use case.

Cheers,

-komputes

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