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How to use other compressed images, iso files or tarballs

Hi Nio,

One other thing I found confusing (and I'm not a Linux newbie) was where a user had to place an .iso or .img file of their choosing in order for 9w to find it and use it ... I know it works okay if the user starts off downloading one of the .iso 9w or OBI iso's that already contain what they want but it's not very clear what to do if some other distro file (iso or img) is desired and where to place it for 9w to find it to use. I hope you understand my rambling here.

Jack

Hi Jack,

You are right, it is not straight-forward to install systems that are not contained in a 9w iso file. If there is a lot of RAM in the computer, you might be able to download a compressed image file 'filename.img.gz' or iso file 'filename.iso', into the root partition (in RAM), but 9w is supposed to be used with low RAM computers, so there might not be space enough there. Instead you can download it into some other storage device, for example a USB pendrive.

And you can run 'mkusb' from the command line interface (in a terminal window if enough RAM for the graphical desktop). Exit with q from the viewer 'less' (showing '/tmp/help-mkusb.txt').

mkusb '/put-the-relevant-path-here/filename.img.gz' all

or

mkusb '/put-the-relevant-path-here/filename.iso' all

Tarballs for the standard One Button Installer do not work with 9w. You need special 9w tarballs, and such tarballs are not uploaded separately, only included in OBI-9w iso files. You can create your own 9w tarball running the One Button Installer from within 9w. (I make them that way.) And then you can store them on a USB pendrive and select them via the advanced selecting tool or by editing the file 'selected' manually.

Nio

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