problem with persistant storage - fc13 liveusb

[fattest]

Hello,

I installed fc13 to a 4gb kingston usb stick using the liveusb-creator and allocated ~3GB for persistant storage. This is my first login after installing, and 2GB of persistant storage is already used up

[liveuser@localhost ~]$ df -h
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/live-rw   3.0G  2.0G 1002M  67% /
tmpfs                1003M  188K 1003M   1% /dev/shm
/dev/sdb1             3.8G  3.8G   64K 100% /mnt/live
varcacheyum          1003M     0 1003M   0% /var/cache/yum
/tmp                 1003M   16K 1003M   1% /tmp
vartmp               1003M     0 1003M   0% /var/tmp

what happened to all my space? The drive was formatted fat32 with 16K cluster size before installing FC13.

[fattest]

is no one else having this problem, or is this normal behavior? fc11, 12, 13 all leave me with less than 30% of my persistent storage free. I tried mint as well and although there was some space occupied on the persistent drive, it was not as much as with fedora.

[giulix]

This is a 4GB USB key with 2 partitions: The Live USB one is 1.5 GB (the other one is not used by the Live installation).

[liveuser@localhost ~]$ df -h
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/live-rw   3.0G  2.0G 1002M  67% /
tmpfs                 1.5G  272K  1.5G   1% /dev/shm
/dev/sdb1             1.5G  750M  657M  54% /mnt/live
varcacheyum           1.5G     0  1.5G   0% /var/cache/yum
/tmp                  1.5G   24K  1.5G   1% /tmp
vartmp                1.5G     0  1.5G   0% /var/tmp
/dev/sdb2             2.3G  1.7G  441M  80% /media/1ca23519-99b4-475f-8e5b-f526a6b90e1a

I interpret this as:
/dev/mapper/live-rw - This is where the LiveUSB lives (RAM): I have 4GB RAM, of which only 3GB are seen, as this is a 32bit install.
/dev/sdb1 - This is the ext3 USB partition where the Live USB is installed. The allocated space is taken up by the Fedora 13 Live ISO (Gnome) I installed. The available space is the persistent storage I reserved.
Now, the fact that in /mnt/live you got 100% usage may mean that the persistent storage was not successfully allocated when the ISO was written to the USB stick; happened to me also. I fixed this by reformatting the USB partition and running liveusb-creator again. After you have configured the space reserved for the persistent storage, make sure the slider is not automatically reset to zero: That is a clear indication that, for some reason, the persistent storage will not be reserved.

[fattest]

Thanks for the reply. Well I had this problem using both liveusb-creator and LiLi (Linux LiveUSB creator) with FC11. I installed mint9 to the same usb recently, the persistent storage (mounted to /) was ~3Gb, of which 2.2Gb was free. With FC11, I was lucky if I got 1Gb free on the persistent drive. I ran the disk analyser and found that fc11 installs quite a lot of stuff to /, particularly locales which alone eat up about 300Mb. Mint has fewer locales, but has its own share of useless stuff installed on /. In either case its just a matter of uninstalling whichever default packages you don't need to free up space.

[bonedome]

Hello
just a quick note, there was an update to usb creator yesterday, might give it a try myself.
Another side note, does anyone know, if you insatall from a live usb with persistance, do the (persistance) files/packages also get installed ?

[ryptyde]

Originally Posted by bonedome

Hello
just a quick note, there was an update to usb creator yesterday, might give it a try myself.
Another side note, does anyone know, if you insatall from a live usb with persistance, do the (persistance) files/packages also get installed ?

No! In my experience with installing from a liveusb any packages added after creation will not show up on the install.