Quirky Installer improved

The Quirky Installer, which is launched via the "install" icon on the desktop, or in the menu Setup --> Quirky Universal Installer, has a couple of limitations in Quirky 8.2.

One of the Quirky testers complained that he had to download the ISO file a second time, to do an installation to a partition.
I don't know why, as he would have downloaded it to burn the live-CD -- presume he must have deleted it after that.
Anyway, I have taken it onboard to fix...

Installing to a drive or partition, it requires the downloaded ISO, from which to extract the files. The frugal install, on the otherhand, allows a choice of ISO, CD, or a folder (with vmlinuz, q.sfs and initrd.q).
I have enhanced install to drive or partition to also have this flexibility.

Another tester complained that installation is very slow. Yeah, even with my i5 CPU, a frugal install is painfully slow. A "Please wait..." message displays, and you have to wait, and wait.
The install script opens up q.sfs, using 'unsquashfs', modifies it, then creates a new q.sfs in the target location. The script has a 'sync' operation after running 'unsquashfs' and this is the holdup. q.sfs is about 400MB, xz compressed, and expands to about 3 times that, which the 'sync' flushes to the drive. I am surprised how slow that is. Um, but I am doing the work on an external USB drive.

Anyway, I have greatly speeded up the script by not having 'sync', instead just a 'fsync' on the target q.sfs. But then, my PC has 16GB of RAM, so a big advantage not syncing.

All of this work is happening in /usr/local/install_quirky

Tags: quirky, linux