USBCreatorWindowsBackend

Summary

usb-creator will grow a Microsoft Windows backend. Time permitting, it will gain an Apple OSX backend, but will not write a GUID partition table and do other OSX specific tasks until GRUB2 fully supports EFI on the Mac.

Release Note

You can now create Ubuntu USB images from Windows.

Rationale

The Mobile Team has specifically requested support for Windows and Mac OSX as download statistics have shown that a fair number of the people grabbing their image are running Windows. They have written a tool for 9.04, but it only writes disk images and only works on Windows. As usb-creator is already backend/frontend split, supports writing disk images in lp:~evand/usb-creator/future, and can use a single pyGTK frontend across all platforms, we will extend it to meet the needs of the Mobile Team.

User stories

Assumptions

The following requirements came from the Mobile Team:

  • usb-creator can write disk image files.
  • usb-creator can write to SD cards.

Design

  • The winui Python wrapper to MFC, originally created for Wubi, will be used to construct the interface.
  • A Windows backend will be written.

Implementation

Migration

There is no need to split usb-creator into multiple packages as a result of this specification. The Windows and Mac executable will be built from the usb-creator source package and distributed independent of the Ubuntu archive.

Test/Demo Plan

Unresolved issues

Booting from Ubuntu USB disks on Mac OSX has not worked in the past. We will investigate the state of GRUB2's EFI support further to determine when we can make a reasonable effort at booting Ubuntu USB disks on Intel Macs.

BoF agenda and discussion

CategorySpec

USBCreatorWindowsBackend (last edited 2009-06-02 14:42:22 by cpc3-slam5-2-0-cust447)