yastfli, pronounced justfly, is a relatively simple script to copy Fedora Live
ISOs onto USB memory sticks and external drives, with an overlay for permanent
storage. It supports ext4 and fat32 for the data partition, as well as
image or directory types of overlay for ext4.
I came about writing it after I started looking into livecd-iso-to-disk not
fully working since Fedora 37 [1][2][3][4]. It is not an attempt at replacing
livecd-iso-to-disk, which has many options and it can do a lot more than I
would ever care to add to yastfli. Possibly due to the inherent complexity of
livecd-iso-to-disk, no one has stepped up to fix it so far, leading to some
attempts amongst the community, including this, to produce a script that can,
at least, add an overlay for permanent storage to Fedora Live.
- [1] https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2180524
- [2] https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2152842
- [3] livecd-tools/livecd-tools#253
- [4] livecd-tools/livecd-tools#262
On normal mode, yastfli will destroy all existing data on the target drive.
If you are looking for a tool that would preserve existing data, while adding
the new Live OS, yastfli is not the right tool. If you don't truly understand
what I mean by that, this is probably not for you either. It only takes a
moment of confusion between using /dev/sda or /dev/sdb to wipe out your
hard drive and get yourself into a big mess.
With the above disclaimer out of the way, let’s take a quick look at the help option.
SYNTAX
(sudo) yastfli [options] --iso <path> --target <device>
OPTIONS
--directory|-d
Use a directory overlay instead of an image file.
It can't be used with fat32. Size option would be ignored.
Default is false.
--filesystem|-f [ext4|fat32]
Filesystem of the data partition.
Default is ext4.
--iso|-i
Path to Live ISO file.
--label|-l
Label of the data partition.
Default is LIVE.
--no-overlay|-n
Don't create an overlay.
Default is false.
--preserve|-p
Don't format EFI and data partitions.
Delete EFI, images and LiveOS folders instead. Deletes overlay.
Default is false.
--size-mb|-s
Size in MB of the overlay file.
It can't be more than 4095 for fat32 data partitions.
Default is 512.
--target|-t
Target device e.g. /dev/sda.
--help|-h
This help.
You will need root access or to be able to run yastfli with sudo and, at
the very least, you will have to provide the path to the ISO file and the
target device that you want to write it to.
sudo ./yastfli -i path/to/ISO -t /dev/sdX
If no other argument is provided, yastfli will use ext4 for the data
partition and create an overlay image of 512M.
To create a larger overlay image, you would use -s size.
sudo ./yastfli -i path/to/ISO -t /dev/sdX -s 2048
To use fat32 instead of ext4 for the data partition, you would use
-f fat32. The size of the overlay image would be limited to 4095M and you
would not be able to use a directory overlay.
sudo ./yastfli -i path/to/ISO -t /dev/sdX -s 2048 -f fat32
If you preferred to use a directory overlay, your only option is ext4 which
is the default file system for the data partition and you would enable it
with -d.
sudo ./yastfli -i path/to/ISO -t /dev/sdX -d
If you did not want to create any overlay at all, you would use -n. Any
overlay-related option used in error would be ignored.
sudo ./yastfli -i path/to/ISO -t /dev/sdX -n
If you preferred to use your own label for the data partition, you would use
-l mylabel, which is compatible with all the other options, but be aware that
it isn’t sanitised to make it compliant with either file format’s requirements.
sudo ./yastfli -i path/to/ISO -t /dev/sdX -l MY_LABEL
While --preserve|-p is just another option like those above, documenting it
needs further elaboration. Hence, it has its own section.
Firstly, a disclaimer again. You should not use yastfli with any device
storing any data that you can't risk to lose or it would be rather inconvenient
to do so. That includes using yastfli with the preserve option as described
here since things can, and do, go wrong from time to time.
Under normal operation, yastfli simply formats the entire target device and
creates two partitions, an EFI partition and a data partition. What the
preserve option does is to skip the formatting and, instead, it deletes the EFI
and images folders on the EFI partition, as well as the LiveOS folder on the
data partition which also contains the overlay, whether that is a file overlay
or a directory overlay.
The preserve feature has been developed with the premise that you have already
created a LiveOS device with yastfli, so it is bootable and it works, and you
just want to refresh the image in it, without deleting files and folders on the
data partition outside the LiveOS structure.
With all that in mind, options like --filesystem|-f or --label|-l become
irrelevant, since they are set when formatting in yastfli. You also can't use
a directory overlay when the data partition is already fat32.
Finally, the preserve option is invoked simply adding the option to the command line.
sudo ./yastfli -i path/to/ISO -t /dev/sdX -p
You can use some options like overlay directory on ext4.
sudo ./yastfli -i path/to/ISO -t /dev/sdX -p -d
And also overlay size.
sudo ./yastfli -i path/to/ISO -t /dev/sdX -p -s 2048
I know for a fact that it can write OpenSUSE Live, but it doesn’t boot. Ubuntu uses a very different structure, but you have plenty of other options for it. In summary, it is possible that you can complete the process with some other distributions but not very likely that it will actually result on a bootable Live OS with persistent overlay.