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
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