So, I’ve been experimenting with the openSUSE 11.3 Live GNOME iso files.
I’ve put these on a 16gb USB drive and it boots and runs very well. However, I’ve done some looking around and have a few questions I hope someone can answer.
Can I install/update software and have it persistent between boots? I’m hoping to keep a system on a USB thumb drive thats not installed anywhere but on the USB thumbdrive.
The USB drive I’m using is a 16GB drive and it works very well, however, if I do a df -lkh, it only reports:
which roughly adds up to 8G, and not 16G. Is there an 8G cap on the Live USB images? Is it worth even using a 16G USB drive? I noticed the first boot, did create a 2nd partition on the thumb drive that was close to 14.5GB, but curious to the difference between what is shown in df vs actual partition sizes.
No, you can’t update the image. Even though it’s on a R/W medium, the filesystem on it is ISO9660, a CD filesystem, which is not writable.
That df output needs a bit of nous to read. The devtmpfs and tmpfs system aren’t on the USB memory but in RAM so that doesn’t count towards the 16G. The filesystem shows as 4.6G because that’s the size of the CD filesystem. Essentially the remainder of the USB stick is not used.
If you want a Linux OS on a USB stick that would have be a different distro, e.g. Puppy Linux. openSUSE is not built that way, it’s ultimately intended to be installed on a HD and the Live image is just a demo.
Any thoughts or possibilities to install it to a USB thumb drive as if it was a hard disk? I know I’d have issues with lilo/grub to boot it, but to take a USB drive and partition it, and install it properly?
I also know that hardware would be different between machines and such and loading drivers would be an issue on boot, but just curious.
Don’t know, never tried it. Why not give it a shot? You’d need two sticks, one to boot and one to hold the working install. Or boot off a CD/DVD.
However, bear in mind that flash memory doesn’t like being treated like HDs in Linux are, where certain directories and files get rewritten often. This could lead to shortened life. Flash likes the writes to be spread across the memory.