I've been unsuccessfully trying for a while now to set up a Linux distribution on an older box (that has no hard drives) using a USB stick. My most recent attempts have been with Fedora 17 and Fedora 18.

Two-ish months ago (when I last tried 17), I used Fedora LiveUSB Creator and chose "Download Fedora" and "Fedora 17 x86_64 Desktop", and set persistent storage to ~500MB (8GB USB Stick).

I then created the liveUSB and was able to boot from it on the target machine, but only once. The second time, it wouldn't boot, complaining about something with the partitions (I can't remember at the moment what). If important, I can retry and get the exact error message, but I'd be just as happy to get F18 working right.

This time, I downloaded http://torrent.fedoraproject.org/tor...esktop.torrent and chose "Use Existing Live CD", and set persistent storage to ~500MB. I booted up, and then powered down, and then booted up again- and JOY: it worked.

Then I put in my wireless password information, and rebooted. Well it came back up fine, except it forgot/dropped/didn't save the wireless information.

How do I make this computer run Fedora 18 off of just the USB stick? I don't plan on installing a hard drive (to keep noise/cost down)... But I definitely don't want to have to re-enter the wifi info every time.

Based on what others had written in other forums, I thought this stuff was easy.

Any help appreciated!

TLDR: Fedora18 LiveUSB won't remember wifi settings across reboots despite being created with ~500MB of persistent storage (according to Fedora LiveUSB Creator).

If you want to usee that installation permanently I would recommend to use a "real" install instead of a Live system. It will be larger on the USB device, but will not have problems with any changes you make.

1 members found this post helpful.

Everything on http://torrent.fedoraproject.org/ is either a dvd size or a "live" iso. You think I should try http://torrent.fedoraproject.org/tor...64-DVD.torrent ? I was trying to avoid downloading over 4.5GB if I did not need to.

If you see a different link I should try, please point it out!

Thanks for the reply!

You don't need a new ISO file, just burn the ISO you already have to a CD (as image, not as data CD), boot from it and use it to install Fedora to the USB device. To be sure that the bootloader gets installed to the USB I would recommend to disconnect the internal HDD for the time of the installation.

? What is the point of the "persistent storage" option in the Liveusb creator?
Anyway, I appreciate the suggested workarounds. I'll write off the liveusb creator as "still not ready for primetime" and give the workarounds a try.

By the way, I ended up trying out installing Linux Mint onto the USB stick (via the burn-it-to-DVD, install to USB route). I decided since LiveUSB Creator wasn't going to work for Fedora, there was nothing constraining me from just trying a distro I had not tried before. Mint installed fine, and worked fine eventually (you can find my other thread to see more on that, if you are interested for some reason).

Thanks again TobiSGD!