dCore-usbinstall

[Jason W]

Hi PDP-8

dCore-usbinstall does not download and iso, only the dCore*.gz and vmlinuz* files, and it saves them in /etc/sysconfig/tcedir/dCoreusbinstall.  If the tce directory is on persistent storage, then those files are saved and used on later runs of dCore-usbinstall.  New md5sum files are downloaded on each run, and if the old dCore*.gz and vmlinuz* files pass md5 check they are used and not re-downloaded.

dCore-usbinstall is posted with an update to support UEFI.  A menu to choose between UEFI and LEGACYBIOS has been added, LEGACYBIOS simply is the previous way the installer worked, creating an ext2 partition that uses the whole usb drive.

The UEFI option creates a fat32 filesystem on a first partition of the usb drive.  The size of that first partition is the size of the dCore*.gz plus the vmlinuz* plus 20MB.  The 20MB is to leave room for the roughly 10MB needed for the grub files.  The size of my first partition created when installing dCore-stretch64 is 41MB, 32MB which was used by the installation.  This way the second ext2 partition created is the maximum possible size, and this second partition is where the TCE directory will be created upon booting the usb. 

Both a 32 and 64 bit grub efi boot files are installed whether the current session is 32 or 64 bit dCore.  I may later make dCore-usbinstall not install 32 bit grub efi files if a 64 bit dCore installation target is chosen as booting the resulting usb on 32 bit is not needed. 

Everything seems to be working as expected, please import and test. 

[Jason W]

Noticed an issue when running dCore-xenial and using dCore-usbinstall, should be fixed now. 

dCore-wheezy's grub-efi package is too old, so dCore-usbinstall won't work using a running dCore-wheezy session but dCore-wheezy can be installed to usb. 

EDIT:  On using dCore-usbinstall in the same boot session with different usb devices, I noticed errors involving partitioning and formatting .  They are fixed now, so please re-import if any errors have been seen. 

[Jason W]

Just made some changes in the grub UEFI install process now that I am able to test boot the results, previously the resulting usb would not boot.  UEFI installing should be good now.