yastfli, pronounced justfly, is a relatively simple script to copy Fedora Live ISOs onto USB memory sticks and external drives, with an overlay for permanent storage. It supports ext4 and fat32 for the data partition as well as image or directory types of overlay for ext4.
I came about writing it after I started looking into livecd-iso-to-disk not fully working since Fedora 37 [1][2][3][4]. It is not an attempt at replacing livecd-iso-to-disk which has many options and can do a lot more than I would ever care to add to yastfli. Possibly due to the inherent complexity of livecd-iso-to-disk, no one has stepped up to fix it so far, leading to some attempts amongst the community, including this, to produce a script that can at least add an overlay for permanent storage to Fedora Live.
[1] https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2180524 [2] https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2152842 [3] livecd-tools/livecd-tools#253 [4] livecd-tools/livecd-tools#262
yastfli will destroy all existing data on the target drive. If you are looking for a tool that would preserve existing data, while adding the new Live OS, yastfli is not the right tool. If you don’t truly understand what I mean by that, this is probably not for you either. It only takes a moment of confusion between using /dev/sda or /dev/sdb to wipe out your hard drive and get yourself into a big mess.
With the above disclaimer out of the way, let’s take a quick look at the help option.
SYNTAX
(sudo) yastfli [options] --iso <path> --target <device>
OPTIONS
--directory|-d
Use a directory overlay instead of an image file.
It can't be used with fat32. Size option would be ignored.
Default is false.
--filesystem|-f [ext4|fat32]
Filesystem of the data partition.
Default is ext4.
--iso|-i
Path to Live ISO file.
--label|-l
Label of the data partition.
Default is LIVE.
--size-mb|-s
Size in MB of the overlay file.
It can't be more than 4095 for fat32 data partitions.
Default is 512.
--target|-t
Target device e.g. /dev/sda.
--help|-h
This help.
You’ll need root access or being able to run yastfli with sudo and at the very least, you’ll have to provide the path to the ISO file and the target device that you want to flash.
sudo ./yastfli -i path/to/ISO -t /dev/sdX
If no other argument is provided, yastfli will use ext4 for the data partition and create an overlay image of 512M.
To create a larger overlay image, you would use -s size.
sudo ./yastfli -i path/to/ISO -t /dev/sdX -s 2048
To use fat32 instead of ext4 for the data partition, you would use -f fat32. The size of the overlay image would be limited to 4095M and you would not be able to use a directory overlay.
sudo ./yastfli -i path/to/ISO -t /dev/sdX -s 2048 -f fat32
If you prefered to use a directory overlay, your only option is ext4 which is the default file system for the data partition and you would enable it with -d.
sudo ./yastfli -i path/to/ISO -t /dev/sdX -d
If you preferred to use your own label for the data partition, you would use -l mylabel, which is compatible with all the other options, but be aware that it isn’t sanitised to make it compliant with either file format’s requirements.
sudo ./yastfli -i path/to/ISO -t /dev/sdX -l MY_LABEL
I know for a fact that it can flash OpenSUSE Live, but it doesn’t boot. Ubuntu uses a very different structure but you have plenty of other options for it. In summary, it’s possible that you can complete the process with some other distributions but not very likely that it will actually result on a bootable Live OS with persistent overlay.