Fedora 9 on a USB stick

[Void Main]

http://lifehacker.com/391067/fedora-9-p ... -usb-drive

[kovax]

Now this will be very useful
Thanks

[byrdman]

I have an idea, and might need help with it:

Is it possible to have OS on a usb stick. When the PC boots up, it loads the OS, automatically starts Firefox in full screen mode, and plays different styles of multimedia?
THe reason I ask is I am working for a company that does digital signage for clients. They currently use a XP box with software that loads the multimedia and plays it.

Because of the problems with windoze, and licensing, and windoze, and...I could go on...
I though that with this type of application, the linux OS could do the same thing?
If you want to have a better idea of what I am talking about, next time you see a LCD or plasma, playing ads with weather and stocks, typically in a bank or airport, that is what we do. The problem is that its windoze based and I know some people have used linux to do this....
It has become a "side" project of mine here at work, and I think it would revolutionize the digital signage market...

[Ice9]

What you want should be quite an easy setup, it's a live system runing from usb with some kind of kiosk application.
Sounds pretty straightforward but why would you want to run it from a usb stick?

Your choices will only be restricted distro-wise, and you could use various different live distro's running from cd or dvd already tailored towards multimedia like Sabayon Linux or any other live distro with an already setup kiosk environment.

If you really want to go usb, I would select a kde-based distro to run from a usb stick and install kdekiosk on it.
There's tons of info on this subject on the net, just yell if you need help finding what you're looking for

[byrdman]

Sorry, I guess the main systems would not be on a USB stick, but I got to thinking that the sales guys could walk around with a USB stick and show the amazing speed of our company!! Actually, the USB would be just for a demo, the actual clients would have PC's running some flavor of linux in a kiosk mode.
Thanks for the tidbit on kdekiosk...I will check into it...

[Void Main]

I picked up an 8GB cruzer and dual booted it with Fedora 10 and Ubuntu 8.10. Made a nice custom boot menu and background image. I set up the Fedora 10 with a persistent overlay and persistent home. Ubuntu also is set up for persistence. Even with both OSes installed plus goodies it's only using up half of the stick so I have almost 4GB free still.

Not sure why but Ubuntu boots and shuts down very slow. Fedora 10 is very fast booting (much faster than booting from CD or HD even oddly enough). I haven't timed it but I don't think it takes more than 15 seconds.

There was a problem/bug with getting the persistent overlay and persistent home to work in Fedora though. There are two init scripts (livesys and livesys-late in /etc/init.d) that create two files (.liveimg-configured and .liveimg-late-configured in the root of the flash drive) to flag that they've been run. These scripts do things like mount the persistent home file system create the default user account etc. The problem is they create these files to tell if they've run and it those files exist the script just exits without doing anything. I just removed the two files and commented out the "touch" line in each script that creates them and everything worked fine after that. Hopefully they have this fixed in the Fedora 10 GA release.