[Fedora-livecd-list] Is it possible to have an updatable system on a usb stick?

[Douglas McClendon]

Jeremy Katz wrote:
> On Sun, 2008-08-03 at 12:18 +0100, Anne Wilson wrote:
>> My laptop runs Mandriva, but because I do end-user support for both Mandriva 
>> and Fedora issues I'd like to have both systems.  Unfortunately I simply 
>> don't have enough drive space to install another OS, so I wondered whether I 
>> could actually install F9 onto an 8GB usb stick.
>>
>> I've read http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FedoraLiveCD/USBHowTo and 
>> http://www.redhatmagazine.com/2007/11/07/i-am-fedora-and-so-can-you/, but 
>> these seem to refer to a non-upgradable system.  Since I need to be able to 
>> use KDE 4.1 that won't suffice.
> 
> You can do updates -- the only things are
> 1) Consistently updating will require significant amounts of space
> within the writable overlay.  And the amount of space required will
> increase over time -- dm-snapshot will never again write to a block
> after it's done so once

Never say never.  Or at least, not in this case.  If you find a way to 
swing a 4G overlay for an f9 system, you will never run out of overlay 
space.

The problem is that with reasonable sized overlay files, the likelyhood 
of blocks getting reused is small.

-dmc