Saturday, May 24, 2008

Fedora 9 on USB

Well I had a 4GB USB drive laying around so I figured that it would be good to test this new live feature on the Fedora Project. The only thing that I found really interesting is that the ability to setup this USB key had a Windows Application to set the entire process. This makes it easy for Windows users to try the entire system with out having to re-partition their drives.

The first thing you need is to download the Fedora Live CD ISO file. This will be what gets installed on the USB key. The next thing you need is the Fedora Live USB Creator https://fedorahosted.org/liveusb-creator. This program will create your Fedora install in the USB Key.

After finally going through all of the USB key setup I booted a computer to see if it would work. The computer worked except for the WiFi card. I knew this would be the case since the WiFi card is a Broadcom chipset. Then I put the key aside for another day, a day which I would have some time to play more.

There was only one limitation you can only setup a maxium for the file system space to use which is 2GB from the live usb creator. This gave me still 2GB for file space that I can share with other systems.

The day has come when I could play more. I connected the key to my main laptop which is a Dell Latitude D820. I pressed F12 to bring up the boot menu at the BIOS. Booted the and found that this computer even the WiFi card was found. Got to love that Intel WiFi cards have a native kernel driver. Even the WiFi led works which doesn't work on the latest Ubuntu 8.04 LTS Release.

Next I figured lets see what I can break. I setup my VPN connection so I could log into a WiFi connection where I happened to be located. Sure enough it worked right away. So now I wanted to do more. I had the system check for updates, I then downloaded and installed all of the updates for Fedora 9 since it was released.

Then I figured lest break something else. I when to Adobe Air and downloaded the Alpha for Linux install and installed it. This was a little tricky since you have to run the install as a basic user and durning the install it asks for the root password during the install. This worked so then I figured twhirl, check my last post. It seemed to have the same install issue as the Adobe Air install.

After that I played with this for a while and figured it was time to add this to my blog. There are a few things missing but for a live version of this linux distribution. No OpenOffice, no out of the box support for my nVidia video card 3D graphics. It does have Abiword and a basic spreadsheet.

After playing with the usb for a few hours I put it away for use when I need it later. All of this post has been produced in Fedora 9 on the USB Key. I hope you enjoy and sometime maybe you will be using a USB key to support working on other computers.

6 comments:

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