Mageia forum

I have Mageia-3-beta1-LiveDVD-KDE4-x86_64-DVD.iso and would like to boot it directly (i.e. without burning a disk or dumping to pendrive) through another OS's Grub2. The only info I could find is the Booting the installer directly from a hard disk - Linux method paragraph from the obsolete doc page: https://wiki.mageia.org/en/Archive:Installing_Mageia, but it only supports Grub1.

Rosa Fresh 2012.1 solved this problem with the script rosa-fromiso which I believe creates a custom initrd, as explained in http://wiki.rosalab.ru/en/index.php/Booting_ROSA_from_iso_file. It's rather ugly and I would certainly prefer an iso image that would work correctly when booted from grub2 without additional downloads and processing, but it does work.

Can it be done? If not, can it be done the ugly fromiso way?

Well, grub2 supports booting directly from an iso image, so you could add a grub entry for that installation media and boot it, no?
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Grub2 ... t/Examples

Yes I know grub2 can boot iso directly and I have done so with Rosa Desktop as mentioned in the link above which describes all the steps including running an ugly script.

The question is, can Mageia do it? Is it documented anywhere? Can the iso be run from grub2 WITHOUT any script? What are the correct kernel parameters?

Grub2 can indeed boot many iso files (using loopback), unfortunately Mageia is currently not one of these.

@gohlip:
Thanks, I suspected as much. Too bad, for it would have helped in spreading Mageia. I was hoping to add a grub.cfg Mga entry to my portable 1TB USB disk, but now I'll have to fiddle with boot.iso, or take along an extra empty pendrive to be slowly written on the fly (on the crawl, really). Sigh.

Do you happen to know if this vital feature is planned for the near future?

Do you happen to know if this vital feature is planned for the near future?

I don't know, I am just a 'normal' Mageia user, in fact a recent one (relative to the people here).

....for it would have helped in spreading Mageia...

It was through Mandrake that I was "hooked" on linux, and I can see Mageia continues with this "hookiness"
(though now, it has to show more clearly how to enable youtube videos on the browser - youtube did not exist when I used Mandrake)
MCC continues to be great (I am not using 'drak' or 'urpm' deliberately). So I don't think you'll have any problem spreading Mageia.
Good luck.

gohlip wrote:Grub2 can indeed boot many iso files (using loopback), unfortunately Mageia is currently not one of these.

Mageia like Mandriva uses hybrid iso's which makes them easy to dump to a flash drive.
Perhaps the hybrid feature is what prevents the booting of the iso?
If so we win some lose some.

Perhaps the hybrid feature is what prevents the booting of the iso?

I really don't know, Ken.

But I find booting live iso for "mainstream" (lack of a better word) distro's like Mageia not particularly attractive; and even if there are some means of keeping application and configuration changes (use of 'persistent' and 'casper-rw'), there is no good substitute for a real solid install. Yes, I do have iso's that I boot up, in a ext2 usb partition (with a grub2 partition of course) that goes anywhere but these are fast, 'easy' (sorry, lack of better word again) like Knoppix, Bodhi, Slax,etc and some of these iso's I remastered myself after configuring them to my liking and apps. And there are many 'utility' iso's like gparted, rescuecd, grml etc that may come in useful.

That said, it is always good to have a distro or that allows iso boots as a means of trying them out before installing or just testing, especially for alpha or beta versions (I do that with Ubuntu) and it is of course good if Mageia have that facility.

Oh, as for dd'ing (pardon my mutilation of English) files, it still requires some level of skill which many will find difficult/scary, hence popularity of unetbootin, pendrive linux, etc (but I don't use these - I have grub2) but I would think (not sure) if Mageia cannot be iso booted, it will not be able to be used on these (unetbootin, pendrive) either.

Cheers, thanks for asking, and sorry I don't have the answer.

gohlip wrote:

Perhaps the hybrid feature is what prevents the booting of the iso?

I really don't know, Ken.

Sorry to dredge out this old thread, but I just remastered my customised OS (not Mageia) which is a hybrid iso and I can boot this iso file on grub2.
If it matters, it uses casper boot and initrd is in .gz not .lz

Hope this helps.