How to get more available space to install packages when booting a Live ISO?

Ask Fedora
1

I’ve flashed a Fedora ISO using livecd-iso-to-disk to my 250GB USB thumb drive like this

git clone https://github.com/livecd-tools/livecd-tools.git # We need the latest version to use `ext4`, otherwise `--efi` it will cause it to default to `vfat` which limits overlay-sizes to <4096mb.
cd livecd-tools/tools
sudo ./livecd-iso-to-disk.sh --format ext4 --efi --force --overlay-size-mb 60000 "~/Downloads/fedora.iso" "/dev/sda"

But after booting it, I’m failing to install a couple of big packages and Docker images (~8GB in total) because I’m getting errors telling me there is no more disk space available.

So how do I get more disk space to install more packages and Docker images?
There is like 200GB of free space available in /run/intiram/live, but that’s not where I need it.

I already gave the overlayfs 60GB, but that just seems to reduce the available space of /run/intiram/live by 60GB without making it available on /.

--home-size-mb is not an option for me because of all the side effects (like forcing me to create a user account etc).

2

Short answer – You can’t.

Writing the live iso to the 250GB flash drive converted it to appear exactly the same as the original iso (ISO 9660 file system) written there, and the rest of the device is blocked as long as the iso resides there. The only free writable space when running the live image is in memory in a virtual file system unless you mount another device that can be written to.

I would suggest instead that you get an 8 or 16G flash, write the live iso to that, then repartition and format the 250 GB device for use at its native size. Using both devices at the same time will give you one to boot from and the larger one that can be mounted to use and store data

Another possible alternative would be to install ventoy on the 250G flash, copy the iso image into the ventoy file system and use ventoy to boot it. Then the remaining space on the ventoy device could be mounted and used for storage, but nothing I know of can alter the iso image while it is in use.

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