fedora-11 live usb - only persistent file space issues

[schneidz]

hi, i just set-up my fedora-11 live usb again but i see the space left on '/' is less than 800mb (i created a 6.4gb persistent file).
when i try to scp a 1gb xvid file to my $HOME it gives me 'no space left on device' ('/' would say 4kb is left and /mnt/live would say 5.4gb is left).

[liveuser@localhost ~]$ df -h
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/live-rw   3.0G  2.2G  796M  74% /
tmpfs                 994M  116K  994M   1% /dev/shm
/dev/sdb1             7.4G  715M  6.3G  11% /mnt/live
varcacheyum           994M     0  994M   0% /var/cache/yum
/tmp                  994M   16K  994M   1% /tmp
vartmp                994M     0  994M   0% /var/tmp

is there any way to save more stuff ?
thx,

[apirdy]

I am new to all of this stuff myself, but what type of filesystem did you set your stick up as? I have heard that fat type systems wont support an overlay file that is larger than 2G or something like that... unsure though

[schneidz]

i used ext3 filesystem so the 2^32 (2 gb) limitation doesnt apply.
seems like something buggy with the persistant overlay.
my stock cap solution was to create a 4 gb partition for the overlay file (of which it says 292 mb is left) and make another 4 gb partition that can hold random stuff i need.
if i run outta' space to yum install stuff to, maybe i'll get creative and ln -s /usr to it.

[schneidz]

fyi, i created a bug for this:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=652709

please let me know if you have this issue and what you did to remediate.

[ryptyde]

Now at the Fedora wiki page for creating LiveUSBs it states:

Limited Lifetime of Persistent Overlay
One very important note about using the "primary" persistent overlay for system changes is that due to the way it's currently implemented (as a LVM copy-on-write snapshot), every single change to it (writes AND deletes) subtracts from its free space, so it will eventually be "used up" and your USB stick will no longer boot. Because of these limitations, it is advisable to use the system-level persistence sparingly, for configuration changes and important security updates only. For a truly persistent write-many (vs write-once) overlay, use the --home-size-mb option to create a home directory filesystem image for personal files. Unlike the primary system overlay image, the home.img can be re-used and loop mounted outside of the liveusb environment.

and

The livecd-iso-to-disk shell script won't accept an overlay size value greater than 2047 for VFAT, but for ext[23] filesystems it is only limited by the available space. You can find the livecd-iso-to-disk shell script in the LiveOS directory at the top-level of the CD image. Note that you'll need to have space on your USB stick for the live image plus your overlay plus any other data you want on the stick.

I usually run the "livecd-iso-to-disk" script and used it to install F14 live.iso to an 8GB device like this:

livecd-iso-to-disk --unencrypted-home --home-size-mb 2047 --overlay-size-mb 2047 Fedora-14-i686-Live-Desktop.iso /dev/sdf1

phil

[schneidz]

^ thanks phil, good advice. (i knew that the live-usb should be used in a production server environment but it seems not even advisable as a desktop solution.

i've been having good luck with using it on my keychain everytime i needed to get internet access and bash shell to show an ad-hoc picture presentation or watch a movie on a plane
...

i wonder if it is possible to configure yum to install stuff to /home/liveuser

[schneidz]

^ i still dont have much space to install programs.

is there a way to trick yum into installing programs under /home/liveuser/programs ?

thx,