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newsEasyDD-portable runs on any Linux
EasyDD is a script for writing an image file to a drive. Users of older Puppy Linuxes had a problem, the 'dd' utility lacked a required feature. Mike Walsh fixed that by bundling a newer version of 'dd', as a PET, self-extracting archive, and an AppImage:
http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=116481
Mike's work is really great. All pups and Puppy-derivatives have 'gtkdialog', required for the GUI mode, however, most other distributions don't have it. So, inspired by Mike, I have created a self-extracting archive with everything in it, including 'gtkdialog', maned EasyDD-portable.
I have written a page for EasyDD:
https://bkhome.org/linux/easydd-write-image-file-to-drive.html
...notice the "no liability" disclaimer!
EasyDD-portable download (18MB):
http://distro.ibiblio.org/easyos/project/easydd/easydd.gz
I created the self-extracting archive by a grass-roots method, inspired by this page:
https://coderwall.com/p/y3upqw/creating-a-self-extracting-archive-installer-script
My project tarball is here:
http://distro.ibiblio.org/easyos/project/easydd/easydd-project.tar.gz
The tarball expands to folder 'easydd-project' and inside the is a build script, 'create-easydd'. Here is the script:
#!/bin/sh
#creates a self-extracting archive named 'easydd.run', that will run easydd.
#ref: https://coderwall.com/p/y3upqw/creating-a-self-extracting-archive-installer-script
[ -f easydd.tar.gz ] && rm -f easydd.tar.gz
tar -cvf easydd.tar easydd.dir/
gzip -9 easydd.tar
[ -f easydd ] && rm -f easydd
cat << 'EOF' >> easydd
#!/bin/sh
EXE="$(realpath ${0})"
PARAM1=''; PARAM2=''
if [ "$1" ];then
if [ "${1:0:1}" == "-" ];then
PARAM1="$1" #-h or --help
else
PARAM1="$(realpath $1)"
fi
fi
[ "$2" ] && PARAM2="$2"
mkdir -p /tmp/easydd-portable-run
cd /tmp/easydd-portable-run
tail -n +18 $EXE | gzip -vdc - | tar -xvf - > /dev/null || exit 1
cd easydd.dir
cp -a -f ./easydd.sh /tmp/easydd.sh 2>/dev/null
exec /tmp/easydd.sh ${PARAM1} ${PARAM2}
EOF
cat easydd.tar.gz >> easydd
chmod 755 easydd
It creates a script named 'easydd' with the code that you can see
between the two "EOF" markers. The chrootable 'rootfs' tarball,
easydd.tar.gz, is appended onto 'easydd'. When 'easydd' is executed, the
'rootfs' tarball is expanded at /tmp/easydd-portable-run and a script
'easydd.sh' is run.
EDIT 2020-06-16:
EasyDD-portable has been abandoned. Instead, the simple EasyDD script
has been enhanced to run on nearly all Linux distributions. There is an
introduction page, with download link:
Tags: linux