Shrink DVD to fit on 4GB USB drive

[dragonbite]

Why is it that DVDs are over 4 GB but USB drives come in 2/4/8/+ GB? Means I have to get an 8GB drive to run an installation DVD! Or Why didn't the USB drives come in 5 GB size? Anyway...

Is there an easy way to take an installation DVD and remove some parts of it (.rmp files I am not planning on installing) so it will fit on a bootable USB drive?

Or am I forced to stick with a Netinstall CD?

Also, what is the best way to install the DVD on a USB? "dd"?

---------- Post added at 03:36 PM CST ---------- Previous post was at 02:41 PM CST ----------

Looking at the downloads, it says that the DVD version is only 2.98GB. If this is true then this thread is moot, as this will fit on a 4GB drive.

[William Haller]

RAM works in powers of 2. DVDs were constrained to the then prevalent CD player media size, that ended up holding 4.7 GB or so. Distributions being what they are, they use every available spot on the prevalent media - DVD being the current prevalent media, and everything else has to adapt.

I would assume that you could remove some files that you didn't want to use, but I've never tried it. The dependencies might be surprising, but if it fails, you could always just add the missing package in and try taking something else out.

Or you could just get a 8 GB USB drive - they aren't that expensive. Or you could make a local repository with everything on it, and then do a net install. That's what we do here for most CentOS and Fedora boxes.

A du --si on my isos directory for F12 set shows 3.3G for the i686 iso and 3.6G for the x86_64 iso

I think there are some good threads on USB distributions, so I won't repeat that information here.

[Firewing1]

The DVD image should fit on the USB key if it's only 2.98GB, but if it's larger than you're key there isn't much you can do. Removing files is tricky since you can cause bugs in the installer if it tries to access a file it thinks should be there that isn't, and RPM packages are already compressed.

[ozjd]

Have a look at http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=205596 particularly the second post which talks about removing files.