Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy) Live USB

Creating a Live USB is not as easy as it should be. There is a manual available which describes in detail how to create such a bootable USB. Although I did every according to the manual, the Live USB didn't boot, it kept showing a semicolon and adding a semicolon for every key I pressed.

I did a similar thing some time ago with Trinity Rescue Kit, which eventually resulted in a bootable 128MB TRK thumb drive. So, to make sure it wasn't my new 1GB thumb's fault, I downloaded the TRK tar.gz and iso. After a while messing with the tar.gz, I gave up and got my VMware up and running with the trk .iso attached. After adjusting the vmware config to enable usb ports to be passed to the virtual machine, I had a TRK boot with acces to my usb drive. It took the trk2usb command some time, but after a while I had my bootable TRK 1GB thumb. I added a virtual hard disk to my virtual machine using the USB drive as a “physical drive (for advanced users)”, to be able to boot from it.

If you ever want to build a bootmenu, use vmware or something similar, it allows you to test your work while keeping your text editor on the job. By the way, it also boots very fast. I edited the syslinux.cfg provided by TRK and after I while, I got the hang of it. Using the README on SYSLINUX menu systems (I created a mirror), I adjusted the menu to my own color settings and created a new background image.

New Background

I combined both TRK syslinux.cfg and Ryan's syslinux.cfg (omitting a lot) into 

default vesamenu.c32
prompt 0

menu title     Ubuntu 8.04 Desktop Live USB
menu background bootlogo.jpg
menu color title 30;40      #F0000000 #00000000 none
menu color tabmsg 30;40      #F0000000 #00000000 none

MENU WIDTH 75
MENU MARGIN 5
MENU PASSWORDMARGIN 3
MENU ROWS 5
MENU TABMSGROW 12
MENU CMDLINEROW 9
MENU ENDROW 11
MENU PASSWORDROW 3
MENU TIMEOUTROW 13

LABEL usblive
menu label Start ^Ubuntu and save changes to USB (default)
kernel vmlinuz
append  file=/preseed/ubuntu.seed boot=casper persistent initrd=initrd.gz quiet splash --
timeout 100

LABEL live
menu label ^Try Ubuntu without any change to your computer
kernel vmlinuz
append  file=/preseed/ubuntu.seed boot=casper initrd=initrd.gz quiet splash --

label trk3
menu label ^Run Trinity Rescue Kit 3.2
kernel kernel.trk
append initrd=initrd.trk ramdisk_size=32768 root=/dev/ram0 vga=788 splash=verbose

label trkssh
kernel kernel.trk
menu label TRK 3.2 with a ^SSH server enabled
append initrd=initrd.trk ramdisk_size=32768 root=/dev/ram0 vga=788 splash=verbose sshd

label t
menu label ^Memory tester: Memtest86+ v1.65
kernel memtest.x86

Result: Screenshot during boot.