Well, this didn’t go as smoothly as the live USB versions, mostly due to preupgrade. I don’t have a “standard” install, you might say. This is on a laptop that’s not mine and Fedora is not the primary OS. So it’s very space-constrained. I don’t even have the recommended 200MB (now the recommendation is a whopping 500MB) space for /boot. Personally, I think that’s a ridiculous amount of room to hold a kernel and initrd (even if they are generic), but that’s the default install size.

So there’s been quite a few new releases of distributions recently. Last month, there’s been Ubuntu 10.04 and Linux Mint 9. This month it’s Fedora 13. Anyway, I just updated my live boot drive with all of those and everything works pretty well.

Well, I’ve been trying to boot Fedora from ISO, but haven’t exactly been successful. On the bug, you can see a possible fix, but it’s a bit complicated and requires messing with the image from an existing install. Instead, I figured out a way to do it that uses the extracted files. It’s pretty simple. First, mount the ISO and extract three files: the LiveOS image: squashfs.img and possibly osmin.

Last time I managed to boot Ubuntu and Linux Mint from ISO pretty easily. Unfortunately, Fedora does not work so simply. There is no iso-scan parameter that can be used for it. Fedora uses Dracut to create its initramfs infrastructure. From that page, I found the rdshell parameter that could be added to the kernel command line to get into a shell before switching to the real root and init. Once there, I was able to mount the USB drive, then the ISO, and finally the actual live image.

So yesterday, I downgraded from ext4 to ext3. I think I forgot to set SELinux to permissive, so a couple things ended up wrong. I re-labelled everything. This is what it looked like: Now, there are a few things wrong there. First, the text really doesn’t doesn’t fit in. I think this is because KMS sets up the blue background, but isn’t quite connected to the virtual console nicely. There’s always work going on there, but it’s not quite right yet.

So, a little while ago, I replaced Gentoo with Fedora 11 on my laptop. The laptop is a little older and prone to overheating when compiling, so I didn’t see the value in using Gentoo there. And I never quite figured out the cross-compile for my desktop since it was AMD64->x86. I ran into one very annoying problem, and that was with ext4. Every so often, any disk I/O would just stop.