USB Live Questions

[itmike]

I have a few questions, so bear with me. I have a 4gb thumbdrive booting i686 live cd. I also have some portable app suites on there, and I have about a gig of space on the stick left. My first question is it possible to update the firefox to the latest release and add office.org to the fedora on the stick. My next question, I did set up a small persistent drive of about 200mb, what is that for?

[ryptyde]

First I would make a back up of any important data. Here's a piece of info from the liveusb wiki about persistent overlays:Data persistence means that your files and settings will remain peristent even after you reboot your live system. Persistence is supported from Fedora 9 (beta) onwards. The primary usage of this feature is booting a USB stick with your live image as well as the persistent changes. I wouldn't know for sure about updating Firefox to the latest but adding new packages or customising your desktop sticks.

With only 200 MB of persistence left I don't think OOo will succeed. I usually create a persistent overlay of 2047MB on a 4GB stick so to give room for additional packages. A good thing to do is to create a live image with all of your "custom" packages first then make the liveusb. Updating a liveusb when newer packages become available may cause your liveusb to not boot to a login so proceed with caution. :)

[poppo144]

first question: possible, you can add some packages to the USB and they would still be there. but 200 MB persistence would be dangerous for adding large packages, your live USB may crash due to lack of free space.

second: that 200 MB is used for storing changes you have made to the live USB. for convenience and safety, I created two partitions on my 8 GB USB. one partition is devoted to Fedora 11 and the other for keeping my files. I still wonder what is the suitable size of persistence. i tried 2047 MB and 900 MB and the size of the file system is the same 3 GB with the available space around 700 MB. you can check this from System Monitor.