Not enough room to update on LiveUSB?

[YAOMTC]

I created my LiveUSB using liveusb-creator, and while I can update individual packages easily enough, I can't update everything at once. It's 500 MB of updates, and I just don't have the room for it. (Just barely, it stops before the last two packages.)

(322/324): foomatic-3.0.2-70.fc10.i386.rpm                                           |  19 MB     03:13
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Total                                                                       113 kB/s | 500 MB     75:35


Error Downloading Packages:
  glibc-common-2.9-3.i386: Insufficient space in download directory //var/cache/yum/updates/packages
    * free   11 M
    * needed 22 M
  6:kdegames-4.2.1-1.fc10.i386: Insufficient space in download directory //var/cache/yum/updates/packages
    * free   11 M
    * needed 32 M

Is it possible to

a) increase the amount of space the LiveUSB takes up on the thumb drive,

b) update a certain number or range of packages and their dependencies (say, around half of it, then the other half after restarting), or

c) solve this problem some other, better way?


I could really use all those updates!


EDIT: Problem solved, see marko's post.

[RahulSundaram]

Hi,

What is the size of the USB disk? How much space did you allocate for persistence?

[YAOMTC]

Originally Posted by RahulSundaram

Hi,

What is the size of the USB disk? How much space did you allocate for persistence?

It's a 4 GB disk, but I didn't set the whole thing to be used by the LiveUSB. How would I find out how much is used? I can't remember what I set it as.

[RahulSundaram]

Hi

http://fedoraforum.org/forum/showthread.php?t=201286

[YAOMTC]

Originally Posted by RahulSundaram

Hi

http://fedoraforum.org/forum/showthread.php?t=201286

So the suggestion is to... format extra space on the thumb drive as ext2? Or should I use ext3?

[YAOMTC]

Okay, this is getting really old. I wiped the thumb drive and recreated the LiveUSB using the maximum amount of space for the persistent overlay, and I still ran out of space during yum update.

Dolphin says I have 918.7 MB free (you'd think I'd have more if I set it to use ~3.7 GB...), which - while it's relatively small - should be enough for the 511 MB of updates. But nooo:

(330/332): foomatic-3.0.2-70.fc10.i386.rpm               |  19 MB     10:08
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Total                                            99 kB/s | 511 MB     88:16


Error Downloading Packages:
  glibc-common-2.9-3.i386: Insufficient space in download directory //var/cache/yum/updates/packages
    * free   440 k
    * needed 22 M
  6:kdegames-4.2.1-1.fc10.i386: Insufficient space in download directory //var/cache/yum/updates/packages
    * free   440 k
    * needed 32 M

?!?!?!

[marko]

So do it in chunks!

step 1, turn off keepcache flag in /etc/yum.conf

keepcache = 0

step2 see what's available for update with yum check-update

yum check-update

-->
step 3: note what packages where are available for update, pick some subset that will fit on the USB key, and update them:

yum update package1 package2 package3 package4... packageN

after that's done, do it again, maybe do a

yum clean packages

here between each run

yum update packageN+1, ....

etc until done

yum update packageLAST-2 packageLAST-1 ..... packageLAST

or use some other means to subset them like wildcarding the names so that a reasonably small # of packages is
matched:

yum update kde*
yum update selinux*
yum update xorg*

and so on



OR install yumex and GUI check box the subset you want to update, and so on.

[ddalley]

Originally Posted by YAOMTC

Okay, this is getting really old. I wiped the thumb drive and recreated the LiveUSB using the maximum amount of space for the persistent overlay, and I still ran out of space during yum update.

Dolphin says I have 918.7 MB free (you'd think I'd have more if I set it to use ~3.7 GB...), which - while it's relatively small - should be enough for the 511 MB of updates. But nooo:

I hear you on this problem, YAOMTC. I had a similar experience, so Iam just letting you know you weren't the only one. I know of no solution, though

I also ran into an updae / size problem, but I was fortunate enough to be using a GUI updater. It took a while to finish.

[marko]

ddalley:

Take a look at my post #7, you don't have to do your updates in one huge chunk. Just pick a subset of the packages, update those and clean that up and start the next. Basically you use yum check-update to see what packages can be updated, then use 'globbing' to just do some of them. You can do a "yum clean packages" in between updates to make really sure the updated package rpms got flushed out of /var/cache/yum

[ddalley]

Thanks, Mark.

I'm not sure why the USB stick, at that time, had such a small partition, as it was a 4Gb stick, but it's done now.

[marko]

I'm not sure why the USB stick, at that time, had such a small partition, as it was a 4Gb stick, but it's done now.

liveusb-creator used to be limited to a maximum of 2GB for the persistent volume because of the limitations of the vfat file system. But now, version 3.6 and later, can use ext3 so there's no limitation (effectively) anymore

[YAOMTC]

Well, it took a while to get through a few package conflicts, but thanks to wildcards I eventually managed to update everything. Thanks for the tip!

[sideways]

I would do a dd image of the whole stick now (not just the overlay), compress it and save it somewhere safe.

persistent overlays are prone to borking and not being recoverable