2009/5/19 Beartooth Beartooth@comcast.net:
I want to use a laptop as a proxy for a notebook -- in the sense of the ordinary English word "proxy," not the specific Internet sense. Let me explain.
My wife, with better vision and smaller more adroit hands, will
ll> of course get (and I hope enjoy) my present EeePC 701 if she wants it, as
soon as I get one big enough for my hands and eyes -- but it will be up to me to get it into the condition she's used to from running Fedora on her full-sized PCs for the last half-dozen years. She has about as much interest in computers as I do in golf.
Suppose I create the live USB stick, and first plug it into a laptop, such as a T30 or T42 Thinkpad, where I have keyboard & monitor that accommodate my hands & eyes far better than the EeePC.
Suppose I then tweak heavily, uninstalling everything we never use (chat, games, telephony, and more), but adding some others (notably Alpine, a dozen years' worth of tweaks to that, a long-nurtured addressbook, her preferred browser, etc.).
When I shutdown, can I make the USB stick adopt all changes, and offer them thenceforward instead of the stock version, the way a Live CD- R of most OSs would do? Or will it perhaps automatically it adopt them?
Supposing I achieve that, can I then run the live USB stick on the EeePC, tell it to install, and have it install my pre-twoken version rather than stock F11??
I don't think this will work. I think the "right" (for some values of right) way to approach this is to boil all your customisations down, such that they can be scripted in a kickstart file and then install from any method you like. The advantage of this approach is twofold:
1) when one has gone to the great putting green in the sky, one's significant other can still reinstall (his|her) laptop. 2) when the above happens, at least (she|he) has something to remember you by.
Seriously though, I feel your pain. I have a eeePC 701 stashed under the bed with only Totem, Terminal and Firefox installed for those times when I can't sleep. I can't even type "ssh" without multiple attempts at deletion and cursing, so I couldn't use it every day.
-- Sam