[indiana-discuss] How to create USB startup Flash disk with Opensolaris?

[Dave Miner]

Willie Walker wrote:
> Hi All:
> 
> What I think is really cool here is that we are seeing a new class of 
> users being empowered by OpenSolaris.  These users are able to download 
> and install OpenSolaris independently, without sighted assistance.  It's 
> way cool, and I want to see us get even better for 2009.04.
> 
>> Getting OpenSolaris on a usb stick should be relatively easy.
>> Here's the latest image:
>> http://www.genunix.org/distributions/indiana/osol-0811.usb
>> The size of the image is 825M.
>> And here's a guide to use it:
>> http://blogs.sun.com/rv/entry/getting_opensolaris_into_an_usb
> 
> Right now, it looks like it's a Catch-22 in that you need to have 
> installed OpenSolaris before you can make a USB stick to boot the live 
> image.
> 

Or at least a recent version of Solaris, but yes, that's correct.

> Is there a way for people coming from Linux or Windows to create a USB 
> stick?

Not right now.

>  I've not tried it, but maybe it's possible to boot from the Live 
> CD, download the appropriate files/images and then create a USB stick 
> without needing to install OpenSolaris?
> 

Yes, that would work, assuming you have some storage you can access from 
the CD to store the image (or you need to have a large amount of memory 
to that dropping it into /tmp could work).  You'd need to download both 
the image and the usbcopy utility, which isn't present on the CD.

Dave