opensuse/imagewriter

Utility for writing raw disk images & hybrid isos to USB keys

imagewriter

Utility for writing raw disk images & hybrid isos to USB keys

Linux Installation

In order to compile, run

** HAL **

% qmake DEFINES=USEHAL imagewriter.pro

** udisks1 **

% qmake DEFINES=USEUDISKS imagewriter.pro

** udisks2 **

% qmake DEFINES=USEUDISKS2 imagewriter.pro

Failing to specify the define will likely not work out.

Then run

% make

Linux kiosk mode

The imagewriter also has the capability to be used in "kiosks" that may have external harddrives. To run in kiosk mode, which both ignores large hard drives and marks unknown USB sticks as "SUSE Studio", run imagewriter with the -k option.

in order to start the imagewriter with sudo, do the following:

% xhost +SI:localuser:root

to allow root access to the current screen and then start the program with:

% sudo DISPLAY=:0 imagewriter

imagewriter's Issues

Extract tar.gz archives from susestudio

SuseStudio generates tar.gz archives for preload usb images. Imagewriter silently writes those archives but this of course produces unbootable usb flash drives.

I propose to automatically extract those archives. Meanwhile I'm using this:

#!/usr/bin/env fish

tar xf $argv[1]
set raw (echo $argv[1] | sed 's/preload\.raw\.tar\.gz/raw.install.raw/')
imagewriter -f $raw
rm $raw   

Still Relies on Qt4

Looking at the commit history, it seems that a port to Qt5 happened a few years back. When trying to run without Qt4 libraries, I get this error

imagewriter: error while loading shared libraries: libQtDBus.so.4: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

This is on Arch Linux with the latest AUR package https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/imagewriter/

reserved identifier violation

I would like to point out that identifiers like "__MAIN_WINDOW_H__" and "__PLATFORMHAL_H__" do not fit to the expected naming convention of the C++ language standard.
Would you like to adjust your selection for unique names?

Opening images from the file manager

https://youtu.be/Ms9Ofu4T07U

Doesn't write the end of the input file in some cases

i++ in https://github.com/openSUSE/imagewriter/blob/531d36b/Platform.cpp#L112 causes the end of the input file not to be written in some cases.

How to reproduce:

# write 3 MB plus 1 byte of zeroes
sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdb bs=3145729 count=1
# create 3 MB containing \xaa\x55 and 1 byte with character a
printf %3145728sa | sed 's/  /\xaa\x55/g' > a.iso
imagewriter -d /dev/sdb -f a.iso
# read the byte after 3 MB
sudo dd status=none if=/dev/sdb bs=1 skip=3145728 count=1

Expected result: a
The actual result is a null byte.

Inclusion in Debian & Ubuntu repositories

Have people already tried to package them?

Writing of images to 32 GB USB stick fails under Windows

Imagewriter for windows is used to burn Studio appliance raw files to USB
flash drives. We have experimented with larger drives and have found imagewriter will not see anything larger than 16GB.

Steps to Reproduce:
1.open any version of windows
2.insert USB flash drive larger than 16GB
3.Imagewriter will not see the drive
Actual Results:
cannot burn usb stick

Expected Results:
usb drive should show up and imagewriter should burn the raw file.

Imagewriter does not work with udisks2

openSUSE 12.2 deprecates udisks in favour of udisks2 by default (udisks is
still available and can be installed by the user "on demand"). On a default
openSUSE 12.2 system imagewriter when started complains "You don't have UDisks
support."

It would be nice to port imagewriter to work with udisks2 instead of udisks. If
that is not possible, imagewriter should probably have an explicit Requires: on
udisks, so that it is pulled in when imagewriter is installed by the user on
openSUSE 12.2.

error when building

me@mypc:~/imagewriter$ qmake DEFINES=USEHAL imagewriter.pro
WARNING: /home/pavel/imagewriter/imagewriter.pro:87: Unescaped backslashes are deprecated.

and make fails on no hal defined

Build process is broken in Platform.cpp: sys/sysctl.h: No such file or directory with glibc 2.32.x

I tried to build from git imagewriter, but build process is broken while processing Platform.cpp:

g++ -c -pipe -D_FORTIFY_SOURCE=2 -march=x86-64 -mtune=generic -O2 -pipe -fno-plt -fvisibility=hidden -fvisibility-inlines-hidden -std=gnu++11 -Wall -Wextra -D_REENTRANT -fPIC -DUSEUDISKS2 -DAPP_VERSION=\"1.10\" -DQT_NO_DEBUG -DQT_WIDGETS_LIB -DQT_GUI_LIB -DQT_DBUS_LIB -DQT_CORE_LIB -I. -I. -I/usr/include/qt -I/usr/include/qt/QtWidgets -I/usr/include/qt/QtGui -I/usr/include/qt/QtDBus -I/usr/include/qt/QtCore -I. -I/usr/lib/qt/mkspecs/linux-g++ -o Platform.o Platform.cpp
MainWindow.cpp:40:10: fatal error: sys/sysctl.h: No such file or directory
   40 | #include <sys/sysctl.h>
      |          ^~~~~~~~~~~~~~
compilation terminated.

It looks like to be related to glibc which removed sys/sysctl.h back in April 2020:

https://sourceware.org/git/?p=glibc.git;a=commit;h=076f09afbac1aa57756faa7a8feadb7936a724e4

So any glibc version starting with 2.32 is breaking build process.

Unable to create live usb stick in Windows 7

There are several problems on Windows 7, although certain installs work:

Steps to Reproduce:
1.Insert USB flashpen
2.Write .iso/.raw to USB
3.
Actual Results:
Exception write during caught:System.ComponentModel.Win32Exception:
Access denied
At ImageWriter.DriveAccess.Write(Byte||buffer,UInt32len)
At ImageWriter.MainWindow,WriteToDisk()

Can imagewriter be international?

It's a great tool for users, but how can I translated in my language other English, such as Simplified Chinese ?
So, can you make a po file for us to make it for much more non-English users if you would like?
Thanks.

Windows 8+

Windows version in 8 and above demands .raw format though openSUSE images are all distributed in .iso. Windows 8 and above has no means to use a workaround.

I'm working on trying to find where in the code this behavior happens, but I'm inexperienced developer.

Inconsistence with dark theme

I use KDE dark breeze theme and Image Writer v1.10 has some problems with it, the background is so white and text is not visible

Publish a release on github (static tarball location)

Hello team,

I'd like to make a release so there is a static tarball location (outside of OBS) that I can refer to from the flatpak manifest. See Issue #31

The last archive in OBS is
imagewriter-1.10.1432200249.1d253d9.tar.xz

Can I just go ahead and make 1.10.1396965491.a4dcffa release i + tag in this github repo Or should I go to more github friendly v1.10 ??

Thank you!

Progress screen doesn't appear in the task bar

HOW TO REPRODUCE:

1. Write an image to an USB drive.
2. When the progress bar appears, open the file manager full screen, for example.
3. Try switching to the progress bar window using the icons in the task bar.

RESULT:
There's no method for switching to the progress screen, other than minimising all the forefront windows.

[Instructions for builds on Linux Mint 18.1]

# Install prerequisites
sudo apt install qt4-make qt4-dev-tools libqt4-dev
qmake DEFINES=USEUDISKS2 imagewriter.pro
make

# Start imagewriter
sudo ./imagewriter

Officially provide packages for Fedora.

Similar to what "http://github.com/openSUSE/imagewriter/issues/29" describes, but for Fedora. The current 2 community packages for it are 5 years out-of-date.

GitHub release and development status

Is this project still maintained? If yes, could you release versioned tarballs here on GitHub?

Make a flatpak version