Using Fedora's liveusb-creator on Ubuntu Lucid Lynx

Posted on Thu 27 May 2010 in misc

I migrated from Ubuntu Karmic to Ubuntu Lucid a few weeks ago, but am looking to make the jump either to Debian Squeeze or Fedora. I haven't used Fedora for ages, so I thought I would give the latest release (Fedora 13 "Goddard") a try. I wanted to use a LiveUSB approach to avoid wasting a CD, but Ubuntu's own "Startup Disk Creator" utility refused to recognize the Fedora image. So instead, I decided to try Fedora's LiveUSB creator tool.

One problem: liveusb-creator isn't packaged on Ubuntu and the dependencies aren't obvious. So I downloaded the source for liveusb-creator and ran it as root. Here's what I needed to do to make it work:

  1. Install python-qt4-dbus to avoid the RuntimeError: To make asynchronous calls, receive signals or export objects, D-Bus connections must be attached to a main loop by passing mainloop=... to the constructor or calling dbus.set_default_main_loop(...) error message. Aside: It should be easy to throw an easier-to-understand error message.

  2. Edit liveusb/gui.py to remove the MD5 checksum verification step. I could find a SHA1 checksum for the images, but there was no MD5 checksum. The comments indicate that the MD5 checksum is contained inside the image - not sure what that's about. I simply commented out the three lines around line 180 to disable the MD5 checksum:

    if not self.parent.opts.noverify:                # Verify the MD5 checksum inside of the ISO image                # if not self.live.verify_iso_md5():                #    return

  3. Install the python-parted package to avoid an error once the image has been written to the USB key.

Now that I've passed those hurdles, I hope to actually be able to try out the LiveUSB image :-)