Questions about CloudReady USB flash drive creation
Questions about CloudReady free Home Edition USB flash drive creation
Other Distros:
Lately, I have been reading about and trying CloudReady's version of
enabling older (both 32 bit and 64 bit) PC's to behave like the Chromebook.
Some what like Windows users trying to make a Puppy Linux bootable
USB flash drive for the first time, I noted the extensive documentation
on the CloudReady's website to hand hold users first time creation of
a CloudReady USB flash drive.
CloudReady's large USB boot image is downloaded zipped and it unzips
to about 7 gigabytes.
(Note: it has more than 10 partitions. you may need to install a utility like 7zip
to handle this large of a zip file. Reports have come in that utilities like
"unzip" can result in corrupted images)
For Windows users, they offer their own separate USB build program and
for Linux users, they suggest using the "disk destroyer" dd utility !
(The download and unziping and making the boot flash drive will each take
many minutes because of the large size of the file.)
During reading their FAQ notes, I was surprised to find that they did
not recommend using a certain brand of USB flash drive.
This surprised me somewhat as I have had good luck with that brand
for many years !
I did not get the impression that they were warning about a quality
control issue with that brand but rather some thing else.
After further reading of their FAQ, I found a possible hint in their
comments about why they built their boot image as a ".bin" file
rather than as an ".iso" file.
One FAQ note mentioned that they made their ".bin" file using a option
called: qcow2
(CloudReady .bin installer images are, most specifically, raw qcow2 disk images.
https://cloudreadykb.neverware.com/s/ar ... CloudReady)
Can any one comment about: qcow2
Do Puppy boot images use this technique ?
What advantage would there be to using it or not using it ?
Thanks for any comments.
Notes:
CloudReady has been bought and is owned by Google.
For more than a year, as other Linux distributions have done,
their 32 bit ".bin" image is no longer available nor supported.
Their last 32 bit ".bin" image is mentioned here:
https://forum.xda-developers.com/t/guid ... 97/page-68
Current 64 bit edition:
https://www.neverware.com/freedownload#intro-text
Like any Chromium system, there is no playstore.
Safe to try on an old PC with no hard disk nor SSD.
(If you login with your old gmail address and get your
WIFI connection, the browser will use your previous bookmarks.)
If anyone tries CloudReady on a PC with a hard disk or SSD,
to tryout the Chrome browser, etc. but do not click on "Install"
because it over writes your entire hard disk or SSD
(definitely not a Puppy frugal install) !