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  • Bruno: One feature of liveusb installs is that the system is compressed. This allows you to run Fedora on a smaller USB drive than you would with a normal install. There are disadvantages to this as well in that the compressed system that is initially installed is read only. Updates are handled using an overlay file system. The initial packages still take up space after they have been updated and updates aren't compressed. So that you end up needing to update your liveusb with updated isos from time to time.
  • Bruno: I think the data persistence issue is being over emphasized. USB drives are fairly reliable. I'd be more worried about losing one or doing something dumb with running it, than it wearing out.
    • Hey Bruno, I ran a class with 12 Girl Scouts all using live usb sticks with 1gb the design suite, 500 mb for updates and 500 mb for a persistent home directory. Out of the class of 12 girls, 4 had USB sticks that completely blew up, some while running, some simply failed to boot later on. I believe it was because their updates directory got full but I'm not sure. Some lost their projects which was heartbreaking. --Duffy 22:01, 21 January 2011 (UTC)
      • Bruno: Unless you got some really cheap or old USB drives, I doubt the drives failed. Filling up the update overlay does sound plausible, though I am surprised it would kill the device. I think for a class like that, you would be better off not doing updates over the life of the class. Or if you need to, just update the specific packages you need. The security risk is small and over a few months there are likely to be a lot of updates. I could see 500 MB getting used up over that timespan. Managing these updates without hosing up /home is not a novice friendly task. livecd-iso-to-disk will do this, but you need to have another linux system to run it on.
      • Er, I said updates, but waht i meant - they were using inkscape which has an openclipart plugin that pulls in lots of images and places them in /tmp. TBH that is the vast majority of stuff they were downloading, and I couldn't think of anythign else that would have filled up the space. While I didn't disable updates on the sticks, we never really went through and updated the sticks and I doubt many if any of the girls tried. --Duffy 22:38, 21 January 2011 (UTC)
  • Bruno: If you download the isos and use livecd-iso-to-disk to make a liveusb there is good separation between the getting the iso step and putting a live iso on a usb step. This wouldn't be suitable for a lot of our target audience, but I think is easier than what the description of doing this via LiveMedia suggested.
    • The main concern is that the default download link should be focused towards novice users since they will all use that, so I am still quite concerned about how they will deal with usb install. --Duffy 22:02, 21 January 2011 (UTC)
  • Bruno: I think the constrained package set is both an advantage and a disadvantage. The full install allows you to use the same media to do somewhat different installs, which can be useful if you have limited space or other reasons for not wanting to install everything that is on the media.
    • Very good point. --Duffy 22:02, 21 January 2011 (UTC)

Questionable numbers

I think your numbers on installation times are questionable.

  • You are comparing USB key to ISo. If getting the ISO onto USB is the painful step, why not compare to burning the IS0?
  • Downloading the DVD will take 4.5 times longer than a live CD, but this is not visible in your comparison because it's hidden behind the 'pain'.
  • The difference in download time is more significant if your internet connection is slower. What internet connection did you have to get 3.3 GB in in 1.5 hours?
  • The difference is also significant for media checking and especially burning since the burning speed for DVD is way lower than for CD.
  • Could you elaborate what the 'pain' was so we can fix livecd-creator and alike?
  • My tests showed: 2:55 minutes for the Live-CD and 15:54 . All tests happened in KVM. The host is an Intel i5 M 520 with 2.4 GHZ with 4 GB RAM and a 7200 RPM hdd. The guests were equipped with 512 MB RAM. This means: The slower read speed of the DVD was not taken into account because booting and installing happened from a mounted ISO. The little RAM of the guest should affect the liveinstall stronger because there already is a desktop loaded. Still the liveinstall was way faster.

--Cwickert 19:56, 29 January 2011 (UTC)

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