On Mon, 2018-04-23 at 23:52 +0300, Aleksandar Kostadinov wrote:
ja wrote on 04/23/18 20:28:
On Mon, 2018-04-23 at 17:20 +0300, Aleksandar Kostadinov wrote:
Hi,
I'm reading documentation [1] for Fedora on a USB stick. The only option to have a portable fedora on a stick seems to be by creating an overlay FS and this certainly leads to getting out of disk space at some point.
I would really like to create Fedora on USB that I can plug anywhere and work off it.
I was thinking that perhaps I can just install regular fedora on a USB stick like I would do on a hard drive. Then it can be updated and used just like any other Fedora machine. Perhaps disable persistent logging and swap so that flash memory doesn't wear out.
One issue I presently know about is dracut. It creates by default images that only support a specific hardware. i.e. if I install kernel on a machine with an nforce disk controller, it will put in intird only that module thus Fedora will not boot on a machine with AHCI controller.
Maybe this wouldn't matter when all things are on the USB drive but then can there be a problem with different USB controller modules?
I was wondering if anybody tried that and has tips for greated portability.
Thank you, Aleksandar
I have been doing this for several years, currently F27, but only as a recovery Stick. I just do a standard install but use a custom disk layout using ext4 / partition - no LMV. gdisk -l /dev/sda Number Start (sector) End (sector) Size Code Name
1 2048 1026047 500.0 MiB EF00 EFI System 2 1026048 1028095 1024.0 KiB EF02 BIOS boot partition 3 1028096 3125247 1024.0 MiB 8300 Linux filesystem 4 3125248 19902463 8.0 GiB 8200 Linux swap 5 19902464 61800414 20.0 GiB 8300 Linux filesystem
I have recently been using a Corsair GT 32GB stick
Thanks a lot for the tip! I am also planning to start with a 32GB USB 3.0 stick. It looks like though that you are having EFI and BIOS mode both supported. Would you share how did you achieve it?
I usually pre-format SSD's, sticks with a "standard" partition layout using gdisk before installing Fedora. This was it for this stick - "BIOS" & "EFI" boot partitions.
All my machines have compatibility mode for booting.
F27 was installed on this stick on a machine with EFI but "BIOS" mode was selected/forced during installation.
I have just re-tested the stick It will boot on a 10 year old laptop with dual AMD Althon & only USB2. Also on Intel i7-6700K machine using "BIOS" mode.
John