ok, now that I know what “persistent” means, I would like to know which file system I should put onto my usb external storage in order to “dd” the .img of the latest nomadbsd onto it.
Playing around with zfs, which seems to be interesting technically speaking, but somehow refuses “dd-ing” to it, I’m not sure how to proceed.
Should I just wipe out the whole usb storage and leave without any filesystem at all to “dd” nomadbsd onto it? Unfortunately, I haven’t found the tools for creating an ufs partition or something similar under linux.
Sorry, if this question sounds a little basic, but the documentation just tells me about the dd command, but forgets to mention the required filesystem.
I’m not an expert. Personally I use UFS on old machines with USB 2 and/or less than 8 GB RAM. For everything else with 8 GB or more and USB 3 or internal SSD, I choose the ZFS file system.
The dd command makes a copy of the image file (here NomadBSD) and this includes the file system from the image. You don’t need to worry about that. The dd command is very powerful. Be careful with it and double check the right device to use. Use the dd like in the documentation and after finishing, put it in your machine and boot from it.
The problem is that ZFS does not seem to be compatible with dd. Nothing is written on it in my case. So I guess that I should just format the usb storage device with ext4 and use dd to copy NomadBSD over.
But this could be stated a little clearer in the documentation, couldn’t it?
i think not to be the only one who here does not understand why dd isn’t compatible with ZFS or any other filesystem. It just physically clones blocks of memory from a device to another, filesystem inside the device has nothing to do with such task.
The issue on this activity could be elsewhere (wrong string command, bad device sectors, insufficient device size, exc…).
Documentation on how to burn a NomadBSD ISO on an USB stick is here: https://nomadbsd.org/download.html
Well, maybe it is just an issue with my version of the userland tools of zfs for linux. I can copy files with cp for example, but dd just does not work. So I don’t think that my device is broken or something like that
I’m sure that your dd works. You can download NomadBSD with UFS or ZFS filesystem. And you extract it on Linux with # lzma -d nomadbsd-x.y.z.img.lzma
After that you ‘dd’ this image with # dd bs=1M if=nomadbsd-x.y.z.img of=/dev/sdX conv=fsync
to your usb device. After booting NomadBSD you get a persistent space on the device. Of course with UFS or ZFS as chosen before. There is nothing to ‘dd’ something into this space. You can copy files from and to there.
To make a test, if your dd works:
touch test.txt
dd if=test.txt of=test.iso
Yes, it is just an empty file, only for testing reason. You’ll see, it works. For deeper understanding try man dd
FreeBSD has an excellent documentation in the man-files and the handbook.