Modifying LiveUSB file system
 

I am trying to get MCNLive working on my USB thumb drive, and I got it installed fine. What I want to know is:

It automatically sets the file system to mount in Read Only, which means that there is no point having it on a thumbdrive as opposed to a cd, because I can't save any changes I make to the file system anyway. Is there a way to (somewhat easily, as I am something of a noob) modify the fstab on the Live filesystem so that it mounts with RW permissions? I can 'modify' fstab from within the LiveUSB boot, but it doesn't actually change fstab once I reboot.

It appears you can save documents and settings by creating another partition on the drive.
See the last paragraph:
http://home.tiscali.nl/berenstraat/usblive.htm

hmm... I'll double check that.

RTFM, and all that

Okay, that allows me to create a storage partition where I suppose I could put scripts that I wanted to run, but it still doesn't let me change any settings. I can create partitions and name them /home, /users, etc., but as soon as I reboot, it loses the mount points on them, because, again, I don't actually have any access to fstab. When it says 'saving changes to fstab' it's really just saving to RAM, so after reboot, I just have two generic mount points in my /mnt. Any other thoughts?

From what I understand, it is impossible to unmount / and remount it in rw mode. I think what I'm going to be looking for (although I don't know if it exists) is a utility or something that will let me modify the file-system externally.

I downloaded and looked at the iso file it appears the liveCD runs from a compressed image. You might want to try viewing the USB stick from another PC running linux to see if it is the same thing. If so then the only way that I know of to make changes would be to remaster your own version.

On MCNLive you can remount your partition on the USB stick read-write with (in case you got only one partition)

mount -o remount,rw /dev/loop/0 /initrd/cdrom

Now you can save documents :-)

Bad news: no easy way to save and reload automatically your *settings and configs*.


--chris