I'm currently sitting in a hotel room
in Casper, WY waiting for a phone call, and thought I might have a
look at the new openSUSE 12.1. More on why I am sitting in a hotel
room later.
At first I had decided to burn the openSUSE ISO file to a
CD. After my my first attempt resulting in a particularly attractive
coaster resulting from a check sum error, I thought I might try
something different. I had a 2GB USB drive (compliments of a
Musicians Friend freebie) in the bottom of my bag. So why not try
something new? How about a USB based boot of the openSUSE 12.1 Live
Disc? While I had been aware of this method of booting an OS, for
some reason I had never tried it.
The first step, after downloading the
ISO file from openSUSE, was to do a quick search on how to proceed.
The search on USB Boot openSUSE yielded this link:
http://en.opensuse.org/SDB:Live_USB_stick. A quick scroll down on the page and I had my answer to installing.
- First download the SUSE Studio Image Writer (there are Windows and Linux versions, but no sign of a GUI based OSX version, at least on this page) and start it.
- Insert your USB drive/stick into a port on your computer. (at least for me this was a critical step, the Image Writer does not recognize the stick if it is inserted before starting the program under Windows 7)
- Use the Image writer to navigate to the ISO file you downloaded.
- The USB drive should be available through the lower dropdown in the Image Writer. Make sure that you choose the correct usb device if you have multiple connected, as the Image Writer will overwrite anything on the target USB stick.
- Click Copy to write your ISO to the USB drive/stick. At this point your probably have enough time to go grab a beverage before the task is completed.
- If all went well, you should see a simple dialog box that says “success” (how is that for minimalist?) once the process is completed.
Booting from your USB drive
This next is intentionally vague. What
worked on my HP laptop may be slightly different on your Lenovo,
Compaq, Acer, or what have you. The basic idea is that you want to
tell your computer that it needs to boot from a USB device. That
particular task is almost always (well, always as far as I know, but
must put a caveat in there just in case :-)) handled by the boot menu
that you have access to when you boot your computer. In my case, I
hit F9 at system startup to get into this menu. You may have to look
this up for your computer. Whatever the keystroke, you should see a
menu that allows you to boot from the Hard Disc, the DVD-ROM,
Network, and USB Drive. Of course at this point you choose USB Drive.
After you select this, you will see the openSUSE boot screen.
A couple of observations: First of all,
WOW!!! Booting from USB is incredibly fast compared with relying on a
CD-based boot. I had the openSUSE KDE desktop up and available in
less than a minute. The speed gives you better functionality. Opening
applications is almost as fast as with a normal hard drive install.
Finally, the speed, at least on this
older HP 6510B 2.0GHz with 4gig of RAM, and a USB 2.0 stick was more
than acceptable. In fact I'm writing this while running from the
stick. I can see this as a real option if you want to run an
alternative OS, let's say for instance Skolelinux or Edubuntu, in a
school computer lab currently using Windows.
