imwriter

Downloads and writes raw disk images and operating systems to usb drives.

The idea is to have a tool that every distribution can use to download and write usb images.

Warning

This version is not yet finished and is not suitable for regular users.

Only try it if you're a developer who want to help with the development.

The backend works but most of the GUI is missing (for example, progress is reported on stdout instead of a nice progress bar, which is in my TODO).

What works

• Drag & drop an image to an usb device
• Update the usb devices view as usb sticks are plugged/unplugged into the system
• Downloads disk image & write it to usb disk on-the-fly . Faster than dd!
• Downloads checksum file from the distribution site
• Calculates the checksum of written data, also on-the-fly
• Checks if the PGP signature of the downloaded checksum file is valid (if present)
• Progress percentage (on stdout)
• All reports of checksum and pgp validity are reported on stdout
• Downloads the list of available images from an xml file in the distribution site although by default uses a local one that gets installed (and currently the source code has to be modified if you want it to download the xml file)

What doesn't work (yet)

• GUI to see the progress of a write operation and messages like checksum/signature validation
• GUI to cancel a write operation while running
• GUI to filter available images by vendor/arch/version ...
• Disable devices being used
• Parallel writing of different (or same) images to different devices (this should work in fact, but haven't tested it yet).
• Confirm question when writing
• Combobox to select distribution and have a builtin list of imagesrepository.xml files for each distribution
• Drop an imagesrepository.xml file to images section to use it.
• Drop a file to a device to start writing it without downloading
• Cache downloaded images/option to cache all images (useful for distribution booths at congresses)
• Allow an tag in the imagerepository.xml file to allow distributions to customize the used icon instead of using one of the predefined icons

Note

In order for gpg verification to work, suse and opensuse build keys have to be imported. Usually this is acomplished with the following two commands:

gpg --import /usr/lib/rpm/gnupg/keys/gpg-pubkey-307e3d54-4be01a65.asc gpg --import /usr/lib/rpm/gnupg/keys/gpg-pubkey-3dbdc284-53674dd4.asc

if any of the keys can't be found, be sure to check the openSUSE-build-key package is installed and import the keys it contains

Requisites

openSUSE:

zypper install kcoreaddons-devel ki18n-devel gpgmepp5-devel solid-devel extra-cmake-modules libQt5DBus-devel libopenssl-devel

Debian:

apt-get install libkf5coreaddons-dev libkf5i18n-dev libkf5gpgmepp-dev libkf5solid-dev extra-cmake-modules libssl-dev

How to Build and Install

mkdir build && cd build && cmake .. && make && sudo make install

How to test

Just run imwriter

drag an image and drop it over a usb device (note that this application doesn't ask for confirmation yet, it'll write wherever you tell it to write without hesitating)

How to Uninstall

cd build && sudo make uninstall