I don't have enough free space on my laptop's harddrive to install and run Fedora 4 server. (4gb just wasn't enough, sigh). My USB ports are 1.1 so I will be using a pcmcia usb 2.0 card and connect an 80GB usb drive. I've seen instructions for installing and booting from a usb drive but not including one connected via pcmcia.

I am using a dual boot to launch Fedora along with XP and, although I was able to install, all the linux drives are so full so I can't install the application I need.

I'm a newbie with very little unix/linux experience. I'm willing to reinstall linux completely on the usb drive or to erase what I have and install part on the harddrive and the bulk on the usb drive but don't know how to set up all the partition/mount information to make it work.

And, just to make things interesting, my boss needs this all working yesterday

You could try using Feather Linux, it's about a 50 meg iso that's itty bitty... could solve the problem without using the USB Drive... but, if you want the storage (and I understand why you would!!!) you could do it either way.

It would require a concvoluted fstab, but that's cool.. you would HAVE to make sure you have the USB drive plugged in everytime you boot.

You could edit your fstab and mount the larger folders, like the /home and /opt partitions on the large drive.

Or, you could just install the whole beast on the USB drive.... when you install the distro (red hat uses a gui installer, right?), just plop the whole thing on the the USB drive, which sould be labelled sda1, or the like.

Is there a particular reason your want FC4? what is the machine going to be used as?

There are other, smaller, distros out there.. Vector is a good one, Arch is (but requires a bit more knowledge about Linux).. Mandriva tends to be a bit smaller in it's insalliation...

I'll take a look at some other distributions. I have to be able to run apache and tomcat for the application I'm wanting to working with along with an ftp server. The application provider has tested with Fedora and RedHat so I thought I would try to get fedora to work.

Are there some smaller distributions that support the server type apps?