replacing the Startup Disk Creator

[Marc Deslauriers]

On 2015-09-17 11:26 AM, Nio Wiklund wrote:
> Den 2015-09-17 kl. 16:35, skrev Marc Deslauriers:
>> Hi!
>>
>> On 2015-09-17 10:24 AM, Nio Wiklund wrote:
>>> Hi subscribers to the ubuntu-quality mailing list,
> ,,,
> 
>> Care to elaborate what the many bugs are? I use it every single day for testing
>> security updates on real hardware and since bug 1279987 got fixed it's been
>> working great for me.
>>
>>>
> ...
> 
>> Ideally it would also have both gtk and kde frontends, like usb-creator
>> currently has.
>>
>> Marc.
> 
> Hi Marc,
> 
> Elaborating on bugs and strange behaviour:
> 
> kansasnoob:
> 
> 1. Aside from SDC being badly borked one of the most annoying design
> flaws has always been the 10 minute timeout for installing the
> bootloader. I'm sure I'm not the only one that multi-tasks constantly,
> and not just at the desk. Watching and waiting for SDC to ask if you
> want to install the bootloader is about like watching paint dry
> ............... but if you get distracted for more than 10 minutes after
> SDC asks about bootloader installation you have to start all over again

That's a one-line fix. Is there a bug opened for that issue?

> 
> 2. Bug numbers
> 
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/usb-creator/+bug/1325801
> 
> But the proposed "fix" resulted in this:
> 
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/usb-creator/+bug/1446646
> 
> My final comment on that bug was here:
> 
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/usb-creator/+bug/1325801/comments/146
> 
> S-D-C is borked - it's useless to create live USB's of either older or
> newer versions of Ubuntu than the version you're running S-D-C on. And
> the proposed fix that made it into Vivid and got backported into Utopic
> resulted in S-D-C being able to only produce live USB's of the same
> architecture.

Bug 1325801 is being actively worked on.

Interesting, I can't reproduce bug 1446646. I can create both amd64 and i386
bootable usb disks for trusty and vivid on my vivid amd64 laptop.

Is there something special I need to do to reproduce your issue?


> 
> mc4man:
> 
> s-d-c worked ok here on 14.04.1 but fails now on installing bootloader
> with 14.04.2/3. s-d-c does currently work in 15.10 (trying to create
> 14.04.3 image)
> 
> sudodus - alias me, Nio:
> 
> There is also a bug that makes it impossible to 'erase a disk'. I don't
> know if it has a bug number, but it is there at least in some of the
> current versions.

That's probably a udisks issue. It would help to actually have a bug filed for it.

> 
> You see, there are too many bugs, that minor bug like the 'erase a disk'
> was not even reported. Once we thought it would be squashed when a bug

You've listed 4 bugs, two of which weren't even reported. I don't think that's
too many to simply fix.

> was being debugged, but it turned out to be independent of that bug, and
> I don't know of any bug report directed against it.
> 
> -o-
> 
> Concerning front-ends, they can be more or less independent of gtk and kde.
> 
> mkusb uses bash + zenity + pv, which are available without importing
> heavy stacks of gtk or kde packages.

I do hope you're not proposing to replace s-d-c with a bash script that needs
admin privileges and doesn't use udisks or policykit. That would be a non-starter.

> 
> Disks belongs to gnome, I don't know if there is any corresponding
> built-in cloning tool in kde (not counting cp and dd).
> 
> I don't know about Unetbootin and Multisystem and the other tools, how
> many packages they will bring. But we can find out.
> 
> Unetbootin has versions for Windows and Mac OS too, which is an advantage.
> 
> Best regards
> Nio
> 

Marc.