Re: Saving space on USB persist installs
Posted: Thu Jan 29, 2009 9:22 pm
Does the USB stick you created still use squashfs? If so, then what has likely happened is that the files you upgraded were removed from squashfs and replaced with uncompressed versions.
Kinda depends on how you created your persistent USB.
Did you follow one of those "how to make a persistent USB" guides on the internet? If so, you basically took a liveCD and made a liveUSB out of it. It has squashfs. - I see this is what you did.
Did you use Ubuntu's usb-creator? Same deal: liveCD becomes a liveUSB. - no
Did you perform a full normal install onto a USB drive, treating the flash drive as a normal USB disk? No squashfs, nothing compressed. - no
One way to use a USB stick for a bootable linux image will be to do a full normal install, treat the stick as a normal USB disk, and use Reiser4 with compression. That should pack your data in pretty good. But you might also take a look at what filesystem you used for your USB stick. A particularly bad choice would be ext3 because it reserves 5% of the usable space for root. You can trim this down and gain back a lot of usable space.
Using the instructions from pendrivelinux, what you did was delete files from the squashfs where they were compressed and replace them with uncompressed files. Thats what happened. Thats where all your space went to.
How to fix this? Start all over from square-zero. Use remastersys to master your own Mint iso image, compressed, and then install THAT to a pendrive. Or start all over from square-one, perform a full normal uncompressed Mint install on your pendrive and update it the conventional way. First way is more compact, second way is faster booting.
Kinda depends on how you created your persistent USB.
Did you follow one of those "how to make a persistent USB" guides on the internet? If so, you basically took a liveCD and made a liveUSB out of it. It has squashfs. - I see this is what you did.
Did you use Ubuntu's usb-creator? Same deal: liveCD becomes a liveUSB. - no
Did you perform a full normal install onto a USB drive, treating the flash drive as a normal USB disk? No squashfs, nothing compressed. - no
One way to use a USB stick for a bootable linux image will be to do a full normal install, treat the stick as a normal USB disk, and use Reiser4 with compression. That should pack your data in pretty good. But you might also take a look at what filesystem you used for your USB stick. A particularly bad choice would be ext3 because it reserves 5% of the usable space for root. You can trim this down and gain back a lot of usable space.
Using the instructions from pendrivelinux, what you did was delete files from the squashfs where they were compressed and replace them with uncompressed files. Thats what happened. Thats where all your space went to.
How to fix this? Start all over from square-zero. Use remastersys to master your own Mint iso image, compressed, and then install THAT to a pendrive. Or start all over from square-one, perform a full normal uncompressed Mint install on your pendrive and update it the conventional way. First way is more compact, second way is faster booting.