FedoraLiveCD

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Download and Create Live image or Live USB

Read the documentation for how to download a pre-built Fedora live image, create a bootable USB drive or CD/DVD from it, then usie it.

• Historical versions of this page are available for live USB and live CD.

Advantages and Limitations

Benefits:

• You can demonstrate features or try out a release, including testing hardware functionality, before hard disk/SSD installation.
• Live USB/CD/DVD installation is faster than regular installation. Live USB/SD installation typically takes only a few minutes and can be configured with persistent storage.
• You can use Live CD technology for backup and recovery of your installed hard drive.

Limitations:

• It is not possible to choose packages during installation. Live images typically have fewer packages than a regular installation image.
• It is not possible to do an upgrade via the Anaconda installer. If you have a separate /home partition, you can just not format it during the installation and thus preserve your settings and /home content.
• It is not possible to choose a non-default filesystem.
• Once you shutdown a computer running from a Live CD, you will lose any settings or packages installed, but Live USB/SD installations may be configured with persistent storage.

Fedora Live image features

Current features:

1. A booted Live CD uses a temporary, in-memory, read-write rootfs, so it's possible to install software for use while the Live CD is running.
2. Data persistence options available on Live USB/SD installations.
3. Install to hard disks or USB/SD drives.
4. Uses SELinux in enforcing mode and other security features by default.
5. Includes best of breed software on the media.
6. Stay as close to a normal desktop install with regard to features, or try specialized Spins.
7. Ability to create normal CD-ROM and CD-R media (less than 700 MB) or DVD images.
8. Make it easy to do a derived Live CD with your own repositories, packages, and artwork.
9. API used by LTSP, appliance creator and others.

Contributors

• DavidZeuthen - Primary developer and maintainer of HAL and OLPC contributor.
• JeremyKatz - Fedora Ninja. Adds backend for installing from a live image into Anaconda.
• DouglasMcClendon - LiveOS device mapper trickster.

Communicate

Fedora Live image users and developers can participate and contribute in the discussions happening in the Fedora livecd list. (predecessor list archives)

Finding the Code

The source code for the Live CD tools is maintained in git. The repository is at https://github.com/livecd-tools/livecd-tools/ . You can install it easily by installing the 'livecd-tools' package.

Kickstart files are in the spin-kickstarts.noarch package.

Hard Drive Installation

The ability to install to a hard drive is available releases since Fedora 7. After the live media boots, click on the install icon on your desktop to start the installation. Installation from live image requires that GRUB and the /boot directory be installed onto a drive with an MSDOS partition label, or that the current machine supports EFI booting. If a pc-clone machine has only GPT hard drives, then you may need to use something such as a USB2.0 flash memory device (with an MSDOS partition label) as an intermediate destination.

In Fedora 15, instead of clicking the desktop icon, choose Applications->System Tools->Install to Hard Drive from the menu along the top of the screen.

References

• Mayank Sharma "IBM Developer Works: Build a Fedora Live CD" (archive.org version from June 2008)
• LiveOS image