Persistent USB install - help

[revolxnyl]

OK.

I've installed Ubuntu 10.04 LTS onto a 4gb USB flash drive using Universal USB Installer. All of my hardware is detected, it boots smoothly and quickly, and i even managed to get the broadcom wireless up without a hitch by extracting the firmware manually to the appropriate directory... so far so good.

Now, when installing with UUI, you have a persistent option - I chose 1gb. I wanted to keep my config stuff - I really want to boot this laptop from USB exclusively. As in, no OS on the internal hdd.

Well, then. I enabled the restricted repositories and commence to installing codecs and whatnot, and BAM! No more space.

What I want to do is set up a Home directory on a partition on the hdd and have my usb install look for config stuff there. Am i talking crazy talk?

I want this 4gb USB stick to hold my OS, perhaps not in it's entirety - the bulk of it. At least enough to get booted up. The rest could be somewhere else, no? I have lots of external drives, but just this one USB stick. The internal hdd is 160gb and is relatively empty atm. I do not have any cash with which to go out and just buy an 8gb or 16gb drive.

Can this be done? Can I have a persistent install of 10.04 on a USB and store some parts of the OS on another drive?

[reed9]

What I want to do is set up a Home directory on a partition on the hdd and have my usb install look for config stuff there. Am i talking crazy talk?

That's perfectly doable. Setup a partition on your internal drive for your home directory and edit /etc/fstab to mount it. I would use the UUID over the /dev name, fwiw.