[ubuntu-uk] Live usb question

[Jim Price]

On 19/02/11 15:54, Barry Titterton wrote:
> I recently created a persistent live USB for the first time. It worked
> perfectly but there is one aspect of its behaviour that I do not
> understand:
>
> I used a 4Gb stick. After creating the stick in 10.10 using the built-in
> disk/USB creator, I added Restricted Extras as well as creating a couple
> of files to test that the persistence worked, which it did. However, at
> this point I ran Update Manager which downloaded and installed approx
> 210Mb of updates. Before the update I had 2.7Gb of free space, but after
> updating this had shrunk to only 1.5Gb. I thought that I had done
> something wrong so I formatted the stick and repeated the whole
> installation, but got exactly the same result.
>
> Can any of the members explain it? Is this normal behaviour for a live
> USB?

The size of the downloaded packages is a lot smaller than the space they 
occupy once installed, because the package files are compressed. It 
sounds about right, although you can reduce that by about 20% by setting 
the option to delete package files after installation in the update 
manager settings. The problem occurs because the packages are not being 
integrated into the compressed LiveCD image, but installed fully in the 
persistent filesystem space.

> Is there an easy way to get any of this space back, or should I avoid
> running Update Manager?

Set update manager to only install security updates, as you don't want 
to miss those. Also, if you are using 10.04, the 10.04.2 update came out 
on the 17th (nominally - about 26 o'clock I think). That includes recent 
updates slipstreamed onto the new CD, so if you use that, you will save 
a lot of space compared to using a 10.04 or 10.04.1 CD and doing the 
updates. It's no help if you need to use 10.10. There is a way of 
creating your own bootable CD or DVD image with customised packages, 
using remastersys, but it is a bit more involved than the USB creator.

-- 
JimP