[Novalug] basic Q's about flash boot of live CD

[Bryan J. Smith]

Peter --

I don't believe this is true with Fedora.  It may have changed more
recently, as Fedora 9+ created major changes in the initrd-init process
(removing the need for Mayflower) and I know the nash shell is now
deprecated as well.  Please correct me if I am wrong.

But the last time I checked, and the HOWTO doesn't seem to be out-
of-date (but I do more RHEL than Fedora in this area, and RHEL 5 is
based on old Fedora Core 6), _both_ CD and USB are squashfs
images.  This makes the images tight, small and compact, including
if they are copied and pivoted to memory.

I'd be open to seeing if this has changed.  But the tools I've seen all
build a stateless squashfs image, with the read-write directories setup
for stateless being located elsewhere (e.g., look for USB dongle, even
if it's the same source as the squashfs, look for FAT/NTFS storage on
any fixed disk, etc...).

But I fully admit I haven't taken apart an initrd-init since Fedora 10 or
so, let alone have done it far more with RHEL 5 (based on FC6).  The
HOWTO seems to back up this approach.




----- Original Message ----
From: Peter Larsen <plarsen at famlarsen.homelinux.com>

... But before we get to that, there's quite a bit of difference on how the
default CDROM and USB live images work. CDROM is read/only - USBs
are read/write. The resulting setup is then very different in particular when
it comes to /home and how that is handled ...