Our last meeting was on Thursday, December 4th, 6:30 PM, in the Computer Lab of the Boise Public Library, Capital Blvd, across from Julie Davis Park. At the top of discussion agenda was Fedora 10, which was released on Thanksgiving. You can now run and install Fedora 10 from a single live CD (gnome or KDE 4) as well as easily install it to a USB drive. We spent about 30 mintutes before turning our discussion to loading linux on USB drives. One of the questions that was asked was USB drives work best. I found that the Kingston DataTraveler, black case with a dark blue lighted logo, the usb connector slides in/out of the drive housing as opposed to an having a cap. Currently, I have SuSE 10.3, Vista SP1 and WindowXP UBCD, bootable, all on Kingston DataTraveler drives. Links from tonight's meeting

http://www.montanalinux.org/fedora-10-review.html
http://fedorahosted.org/liveusb-creator/
http://docs.fedoraproject.org/release-notes/f10/en_US/
Google searches: LUKS and "Fedora 10" +upgrade (separate searches). LUKS is the encryption technology available in Fedora 10.

Since the meeting, I loaded Fedora 10 on my laptop sucessfully and I am very impressed with it. Using Fedora 10's liveusb-creator utility I have been succesfull in getting a SanDisk 4GB USB drive working with Fedora 10 Gnome and was install updates and add software to the USB drive. I found the SanDisk 4GB USB drive to be extremely fast, very comparable to a hard drive in operation. Boot up in less than 50 seconds on a 4 year old laptop, 10 seconds from login to desktop, OpenOffice opens as fast from the USB device as it did from the hard drive. Shutdown in 10 seconds. Fedora 10 rocks on USB! The trick in making USB drives work was in marking or flagging the fat32 partition as bootable (I used gParted to do this) and this works even with the SanDisk U3 partition in place. USB drives are usually not usually setup with with the partition marked as bootable. I tried to use a Toshiba 4 GB formatted fat32 and it refused to boot, reporting a corrupt boot partition but it works fine as a storage USB device. As I have reported previously USB devices are not created equal and the Toshiba drive is one of them. Liveusb-Creator can be installed to Fedora 10 as well as Windows in creating a bootable USB drive from the Fedora 10 LiveCD isos.

We had a good meeting and thanks to all who came out. Remember, our next meeting will be February 5th, no meeting in January.