[OpenIndiana-discuss] LiveUSB and oi_151a5

[Jim Klimov]

2012-08-28 9:19, Jim Klimov wrote:
> Hello all,
>
>    Did anyone test in practice the LiveUSB for oi_151a5 GUI image?
> I'm trying to flash a 1Gb USB token from windows using the procedure
> in OI wiki (with liveusb creator utility), and the resulting image
> does not boot - only shows "GRUB _" and flashes the cursor.

After some tests I ended up with an incredible working toolchain,
albeit possibly sub-optimal: I tried to get some bootloader boot
the ISO or USB images straight from files on a USB storage device
while back at home, so I could go to the shop and "lockpick" the
notebook to test its compatibility with various OSes. Ultimately
this idea has partially failed, but I had a lot of fun doing it
today. So:

The USB HDD now has a 32Gb FAT32 first partition and is bootable
with syslinux, which can potentially boot ISO images with memdisk,
but is VERY slow doing this. While a 110Mb clonezilla image took
about a minute to transfer into RAM, the OI livecd took about 20
minutes and the something stacktraced and the machine rebooted.

Then I googled around and got grub4dos which is booted from the
syslinux menu, and in turn loads the ISO image quite well and
quickly (but fails to boot a USB image from file). This works
until svc:/filesystem/root:media tries to find either a cdrom
or usb distro media, and no longer sees the CD image instantiated
by GRUB. Maybe I did something wrong here?..

The Live media does not include a pcfs driver, so I can't mount
a loopback device with the ISO image from my HDD either.

However when I created a second partition and "dd"ed the USB
image onto it, booting the ISO image with GRUB4DOS from file
on FAT32 partition *did* get the LiveCD to the point where it
found the "USB media" and continued to boot into GUI okay.
GRUB chainloading into the partition with the USB image from
both grub4dos and the Solaris-compatible grub image on the
ISO did not boot the system, speaking of "Error 13". Lucky :)
I guess the partition should have included some GRUB stage,
it has many zero-bytes as the starting part.

So with this setup I got the OI_151a5 image booting on my dying
notebook at home, and it worked in the shop as well. So soon
we'll be closing the purchase of the Lenovo E335.


>    How lacking is USB3 support? Would the ports not work at all,
> or can they drop back to compatibility modes like USB1 or USB2?
> Can they be passed through "as is" to a VM (VirtualBox, KVM) that
> would have drivers to support them better? ;)

The USB3 ports did not work with the OS - not even for the
mouse. One port is powered, so the mouse laser shined there ;)

Also the WiFi driver is missing, at least from the LiveCD -
apparently the laptop uses a BCM 4313 WiFi abgn chip, IIRC.
Does anyone know off the headtop if that driver is in OI,
or where it can be found? I'll go google for that now ;)
I've already seen that Broadcom opensourced their drivers
for Linux 2 years ago, and the code drop included support
for this chip...

Hope this report amuses some and helps others,
//Jim Klimov