raw file, but before making it available to all your friends and colleagues, you want to add in the latest Arduino IDE. With a bootable raw image on a thumbdrive, you can carry around a complete OS in your pocket. As they are read/writable, copied to a USB thumbdrive or SD card, they become “run ready”, so there’s no need to dump everything into RAM and lose all your changes at power off like with Live CDs/DVDs. Same goes for the default SUSE Studio images mentioned above, and a few other distros. Think of how you “install” Raspberry Pi’s Raspbian, for example: You simply dd the image file to an SD card. Raw image files are useful for several reasons. Although both are a byte per byte copy of block devices, and both can be recorded to read only or read/write media, ISO images do not contain a partition table and are read only, whereas RAW images can contain a complete table and are read/writable. ISO Imagesīefore we dig in any deeper, a few words on the differences between raw and ISO images.

Well, yes, but there are several steps you have to follow to pull this off. Surely you can do all that by manipulating the disk image that SUSE Studio provides you with. “Installing” Arduino usually consists of downloading the zip file for your architecture, decompressing it in /home/// and creating a soft link to the arduino app itself from a bin/ directory on your $PATH. There must be a shortcut, right? After all, the Arduino IDE requires virtually no installation as such and very little in the way of dependencies. Packaging the Arduino IDE for openSUSE is perfectly possible, but it’s a whole new kettle of fish. Of course, you want the most recent version. However, the default package for Arduino that comes with openSUSE is quite old, and newer boards are not supported. You may want to have the Arduino IDE preinstalled.

Maybe something like this (by the way, if you want to follow along with this tutorial, you may want to download that). You want an image they can burn to their own USB thumbdrives so they can use it at home or in the computer lab. Say you need a customized distro for the kids at your maker club. There is one serious caveat, however: If you want to add external packages that are not in the otherwise very comprehensive repositories, things can get complicated indeed. When you have designed your spin to your liking, you can download what’s known as a “raw image” that you can copy to a USB thumbdrive, and… Hey presto! You’ve got yourself a tailor-made distro on a stick! SUSE Studio is pretty awesome for building custom Linux spins.

Mount img file linux