Some images are offered for download so that they can be put on a selected storage device.
Is it possible to use such data for software installation also directly from the provided files (according to the ISO 9660 standard) so that extra data copies and system boot attempts can be avoided?
:\ Did you ever try out to use the provided installation process from within a selected Live system?
Not very clear to me what you are trying to do, but adding a DVD iso image as a repository is standard practice, just open YaST2-Software, > Configuration > Repositories > Add > check “Local ISO Image”
That way you can easily install additional packages once you have installed a minimal system.
A live system normally performs a net-install when you try to install a system from there.
There is a way to boot an ISO image on a local disk instead of burning it to an USB drive but I don’t recall the details at the moment, please ask if that is what you need.
In my experience,
There are two main ways of “installing” an OS…
Run an install routine that customizes the installation to the hardware. This is mostly the install images referenced (look closely and you’ll see a few of the next method).
Write a full runtime image to the storage. The image has to be pre-built to the hardware requirements… Because this is difficult to predict on PC hardware, it’s rarely seen but is very common on single board computers, virtualized (cloud) machines.
TSU
The fastest and easiest procedure relies on USB 3.0. I copy the live iso files to an USB stick and boot from the stick. It readily updates from the repos. Thus no installation is needed:
3400G:~ # lsblk -f /dev/sdd
NAME FSTYPE FSVER LABEL UUID FSAVAIL FSUSE% MOUNTPOINT
sdd iso9660 openSUSE_Leap_15.2_KDE_Live 2020-07-28-11-03-09-00
├─sdd1 iso9660 openSUSE_Leap_15.2_KDE_Live 2020-07-28-11-03-09-00 0 100% /run/media/karl/openSUSE_Leap_15.2_KDE_Live
├─sdd2 vfat BOOT FA08-7FDF
└─sdd3 ext4 cow 2b072de7-2703-4d8c-af4c-b4ad9561c27b 51.4G 6% /run/media/karl/cow
3400G:~ #
For installation I use the net install, e.g. http://download.opensuse.org/tumbleweed/iso/openSUSE-Tumbleweed-NET-x86_64-Snapshot20210121-Media.iso
See also https://en.opensuse.org/How_To_Try_openSUSE_Without_Making_Any_Changes_To_Your_PC
I am used to this possibility for a while on a computer with a BIOS.
:\ Can the booting be eventually skipped (because known ISO files can be also directly mounted on demand)?
but I don’t recall the details at the moment,
I am curious on related configuration ideas for a system with UEFI support.
please ask if that is what you need.
I am trying to look for solution approaches again here.
Hi
Seems you want a preload image? This is how it’s done on for example the RPi aarch64 image, write to USB device, boot, answer a few questions and walk away for a few and come back to a login prompt or desktop…
If this is what you mean the Studio Express is what your after… create your own with desired packages etc… can make it a complete setup with users and passwords already set etc… https://studioexpress.opensuse.org/
Please clarify what you need:
1- install additional software on a system already installed and that can be booted independent of the ISO image
or
2- install a new system on an empty partition
or
3- extract a few packages from a live system (and possibly save them to a local disk).
I would like to omit such data transfers.
3400G:~ # lsblk -f /dev/sdd NAME FSTYPE FSVER LABEL UUID FSAVAIL FSUSE% MOUNTPOINT sdd iso9660 openSUSE_Leap_15.2_KDE_Live 2020-07-28-11-03-09-00 …
I am fiddling with an other Live system for a moment.
I would also like to improve boot menus accordingly.
I would like to install software components (to a few partitions) from a selected ISO file while a Live system is running.
While that should be possible in principle, that is not the way the standard openSUSE installer works.
You might have better chances with GeckoLinux ( http://geckolinux.github.io/ ) whose Calamares installer should be able to copy and install the Live system to local partitions.
Or you may explore what Malcolm suggested in post #6 if you want to install multiple copies of a pre-defined system.
To do something else maybe you need to customize your own installer, but that is beyond my pay grade 
Such feedback sounds nice.
that is not the way the standard openSUSE installer works.
This view can be reasonable.
I imagine that a command can be constructed so that a software installation will be started from a selected ISO file as if it would have been booted from an other storage device.
… whose Calamares installer should be able to copy and install the Live system to local partitions.
I do not want to install Live systems at the moment.
I am trying to configure boot menus for installable systems.
Hi
Then likely need to read up on Kiwi and/or autoyast.
This system configuration approach sounds also promising.
I might use it more often if such a software distribution can work also without another separate storage device for the generated ISO file.
:\ How do you think about the support for chain-loading of corresponding menu entries (according to UEFI systems) from selected boot managers?
Still not clear to me what you are trying to achieve, but maybe a look at live-grub-stick might be useful too, if you are not already aware about it:
https://en.opensuse.org/SDB:Live_USB_stick#Using_live-fat-stick.2C_live-grub-stick.2C_live-usb-gui_.28Command_line_or_GUI_way.29
Boot managers like the software “GRUB 2” can be configured so that something will directly be booted from ISO files.
How does the support look like for such functionality together with UEFI systems?
OK, booting from UEFI several iso-9660 formatted partitions each loaded with a bootable .iso image should be straightforward, booting several .iso images on a FAT partition via live-grub-stick (or Grub2/ISOBoot) should be straightforward, but booting several .iso images all stored in a single directory and directly from the UEFI firmware (i.e. without launching a bootloader from the containing partition) is definitely beyond my competence
Anyway I will report back should I find something relevant.
I would like to avoid the creation of separate partitions according to available ISO files.
Thus I would prefer to refer to selected ISO files which were stored in a boot partition.
booting several .iso images on a FAT partition via live-grub-stick (or Grub2/ISOBoot) should be straightforward,
I would like to avoid also to overwrite USB sticks with such ISO images for software test installations.
but booting several .iso images all stored in a single directory and directly from the UEFI firmware (i.e. without launching a bootloader from the containing partition) is definitely beyond my competence
:\ I imagine that a boot manager like “rEFInd” can become more helpful for such an use case (instead of chain-loading another software).
Anyway I will report back should I find something relevant.
Thanks for your offer.
Partitions generally aren’t formatted ISO 9660, probably the main reason is that the format has to be read or write sequentially while hard drive formats can be read randomly which is exponentially faster.
When you deploy something that is in an ISO 9660 format on a hard drive, you generally deploy it in a loopback backing file.
Eg.
https://en.opensuse.org/User:Tsu2/loop_devices
In fact,
loopback devices is the common method used when running virtual machines…
The Guest machine might be installed from a mounted ISO 9660 file (even LiveCD in ISO 9660 format) and the Guest virtual machines themselves are installed on and run from loopback mounted files formateed however you wish (typically BTRFS or EXT4 but can be anything… See my Wiki reference above for details but is greatly simplified when managed by virtualization tools)
Otherwise,
If your data is originally in ISO 9660 format and you intend to run on a hard drive, it’s worthwhile to copy the data off the ISO 9660 source and onto the hard drive formatted any way you want (currently most common choices are BTRFS or EXT4 for large amounts of data, sometimes FAT for tiny amounts of data particularly if the data might need to be read by a non-Linux process or system).
In some exceptional cases like Malcolm’s suggestion ventoy, most of data (the OS) is read into memory on boot and hardly any writing to storage, so the convenience of mounting and running an ISO 9660 filesystem overrides performance issues… but you wouldn’t want to do this on a regular system used every day doing ordinary User work.
TSU
Maybe do as I do, use custom.cfg:
...
menuentry "Install openSUSE TW via HTTP" {
search --no-floppy --label --set=root esplabel
linuxefi /stw/**linux**](http://download.opensuse.org/tumbleweed/repo/oss/boot/x86_64/loader/linux) install=http://download.opensuse.org/tumbleweed/repo/oss hostname=myhost hostip=192....}
initrdefi /stw/**initrd**](http://download.opensuse.org/tumbleweed/repo/oss/boot/x86_64/loader/initrd)
}