Hi William

On 03/15/2011 11:19 PM, William Shu wrote:
> Dear All,
> I must be missing something. I do not seem to install and retain packages on liveDVD installed on a USB stick, despite using the data persistence options on livecd-iso-to-disk, viz:
>
> # livecd-iso-to-disk --reset-mbr --overlay-size-mb 1024 \
>                       --home-size-mb 512 \
>                       <path>/SL-60-i386-2011-03-07-LiveDVD.iso \
>                       /dev/<partition name>
>
> The programs livecd-tools and liveusb-creator are retained on reboot, but not the others. Also, configuration data, etc. stored in the home directory, /home/sluser, are retained.
>
>
>
> Some sample installs that disappeared (Id not matter whether I used yum, ume:
> $ su -c 'rpm -Uvh http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/epel/6/i386/epel-release-6-5.noarch.rpm'
> $ su -c 'yum install yumex'
> $ su -c 'yum install xfig transfig fig2ps gv'
> $ su -c 'yum install ocaml ocaml-emacs ocaml-lablgl ocaml-lablgl-devel ocaml-lablgtk ocaml-lablgtk-devel ocaml-lablgtk-doc ocaml-doc'
> $ su -c 'yum install latex2rtf latex2html'
>


It could be that you have spotted a bug in livecd-iso-to-disk or/and dracut. My guess that in your case overlay is not 
working at all. Because livecd-tools and liveusb-creator are already part of the LiveDVD and /home/sluser is retained by 
the home image.

Can you check on the boot Live USB, if you see the overlay file mounted on a /dev/loop device? Just run

losetup /dev/loop1
losetup /dev/loop2
losetup /dev/loop3
losetup /dev/loop4
losetup /dev/loop5
etc.

You should see something like

/dev/loop4: [0801]:5 (/overlayfs/LiveOS/overlay-XYZ-0A7F-A011)


It would be nice to get some debug output from you. Could you please start the Live USB stick with boot option

rdinitdebug

You can also remove "rhgb and quiet" to see dracut debug messages when booting. After booting, the dracut debug messages 
should be in dmesg. Can you send me the output of

dmesg | grep "^dracut"

Please note that overlay has some limitation: http://www.livecd.ethz.ch/usbdisk.html#limits.

I have to admit that liveusb-creator and livecd-iso-to-disk are not heavily tested with data persistence on SL6.

A workaround would be to use liveusb-creator from Fedora running on Windows (or Fedora), which is more tested. (sorry 
for recommending a tool running on Windows), see also http://www.livecd.ethz.ch/usbdisk.html


Cheers,

	Urs