Being without a homedir got kind of old and painful. A few hours ago I made a LiveUSB install of Fedora14, gave it a 600M "update area", and then rebuilt a reasonable subset of my personal environment over that. Performance-wise, it's pretty terrible whenever it hits the disk (but more like a really slow SSD than a hard disk, unsurprisingly), but now that I know how to tune the system for that it's not really that bad. It's also nice that this environment is theoretically completely portable. I'm still working without my wikis, any media (might toss mplayer and a mix of klezmer, flamenco, and a few other songs on here), a compiler (but I do have Perl, so not too shabby), or the other niceities in my homedir, but it feels at least half-civilised. Overall impression: I should've done this years ago. A portable comfortable environment is nice.
- How does this differ from doing a proper install of fedora on the USB stick?
- There's ugly unionfs stuff happening behind the scenes to glue the liveCD iso to my updates. How do I debug that if it goes wrong?
- Is it worth installing pidgin on this? I like logging everything but every write to this thing is painful
- Do I have enough space to install all the x86 libraries to install Skype? (this is an amd64 liveusb image)
- Do I feel safe using ssh keys on something so easily lost/stolen?
- Why didn't this work on my 32G thumbdrive?
