I wanted to add the usual multimedia applications and the persistence filesystem proved very flaky. Even backing up the persistence snapshot and installing rpm's - a few at a time did not work. The snapshot was repeatedly marked as bad.
Since the problem is likely to be the old hardware, a better workaround was needed. I did not wish to create a new live image from scratch.
I extracted and mounted the LiveOS image on the desktop and then add the desired packages to them. The steps were:
$ cp path-to-usb
$ sudo mount -oloop squashfs.img /mnt
Now extract the files from the squash file system
$ sudo cp -r /mnt live
$ sudo umount /mnt
Mount the ext3 image used by the LiveOS
$ sudo mount -o loop live/LiveOS/ext3fs.img /mnt
Add the repositories for rpmfusion as per http://rpmfusion.org/Configuration but adding the root option.
$sudo rpm --root=/mnt -Uvh http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-stable.noarch.rpm http://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-stable.noarch.rpm
Now, it was simple to use yum
$sudo yum -y --installroot=/mnt install gstreamer-plugins-bad gstreamer-plugins-ugly
The new squashfs can now be created
$ mksquashfs live squashfs.img
Finally, the new squashfs can be copied to the flashdisk.
As a precaution, I recreated the overlay file, e.g. a 256MB file as below
$dd if=/dev/zero of=overlay-FEDORA-6EB6-DB4C bs=1M count=256
I liked the Fedora 11 beta liveusb, but somehow, I could not get ssh -X to work with my Fedora 10 desktop. I will wait to try again but after the official release so that I can update the desktop as well.
Ubuntu uses a different mechanism for creating persistent storage on the USB disks. I plan to explore that as well and see if that is less flaky on my hardware.
