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

[Jeremy Katz]

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
2) Updating the kernel can't really be done without some manual steps
right now
3) There may be some slight caveats like the one mentioned by Richard
Shaw later in the thread as F9 is the first release where this has
really been possible.  

Jeremy