Roger Oberholtzer said the following on 03/20/2013 09:44 AM:
I do exactly this. I build my images with kiwi. There you select what you want installed, and it makes many image types. The one you want is called OEM. It makes an image that is dd's to the disk, via either a bootable USB, DVD or via PXE. kiwi makes the entire thing - including the bootable GUI that does the DD. You can have as much set up as you would like. We use this so we can do identical installs on many machines, many of which do not have internet access.
This sounds like what I want, not least of all pick and choose: I suspect that PXE won't be an option, but my main concern is size and my second concern is partition. By size, I mean that the KIWI page seem to indicate that the the image lives in /tmp . So the USB stick needs to hold the bootable image plus the image to be transferred in /tmp. That means a very big stick. I've got a minimalist Linux running on a 2G stick (irony: they were handing out 2G sticks with a few meg of Docco at a a Novell/Suse seminar, so I've got green sticks with the logo that boot Suse. Good joke. Why can't they hand out sticks that boot Suse?) I've got suse 11.4 though 12.3 running on machines with drives as small as 20G. Client says these machines have drives 80G to 250G, but that just how they come; they can be wiped. I realise Autoyast can do fancy things but it seems like a lot of study and work and need some trials. My idea was a quick-and-dirty. I realise an image might not use all of the disk. Is that an issue for you? Then there's the partition table and the boot to worry about. How do you deal with that? Thanks... -- "To put the world in order, we must first put the nation in order; to put the nation in order, we must put the family in order; to put the family in order, we must cultivate our personal life; and to cultivate our personal life, we must first set our hearts right." -- Confucius -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org