Searched on this board: http://forum.slitaz.org/index.php?p=%2Fsearch&Search=usb+persistance

hello babaorum, Thank you for your help. I searched as you suggested and I tried what seemed to be the easiest solution which was:
# tazusb writefs none. It accepted this with no errors , but it did not provide persistence, so I still have my problem.

When I installed SliTaz 3 on my USB stick I downloaded Slitaz-3.0.iso and installed it using Pendrivelinux USB universal installer. I am wondering if this method of installing the iso prevents persistence from being achieved?
Regards Stan

@stankingston
Add home=usb or /dev/sdX to syslinux.cfg to activate tazusb writefs. This mounts /home to folder tux on the drive for persistance.On the logout window are check boxs to recompress rootfs.gz from memory so installed programs/files persist.Right click openbox menu has slitaz live options as well. It doesn't auto delete the old rootfs.gz files but renames them for backups.The new rootfs.gz will fail to boot on occasion so always keep the previous.gz. Use tazusb clean to delete the older ones.The rootfs.gz and vmlinuz are inside /boot folder.

More info:
http://doc.slitaz.org/en:handbook:liveusb
http://doc.slitaz.org/en:handbook:livecd

Additionnally /home (on usb) needs to be ext3 (there is a bug frorm preventing it to work otherwise)

I have spent a long time trying to get persistence on Slitaz 3, but I have failed,so I am now giving up.
I'm going to try Cooking again, but my keyboard does not work on Cooking, so I will make a new post asking for help to get my keyboard working. If that fails I will try another distro.
I thank you all for your help, I'm sorry I have been such a poor pupil.

Kind regards, Stan.

You could try godane's modular-slitaz, since it comes with the ability to save changes to an external file because it uses Slax's linux live script.

You can download it here: http://people.slitaz.org/~godane/modular-slitaz/iso/20110109/

I might be mistaken, but you can set the persistent file by using the command similar to this at boot:
changes=/dev/sda1/path/file.dat
Just change the /dev/sda1/path/ to that of your usb drive on the system.

Hello Trixar_za, thanks for your input.   I tried godane, but my keyboard will not work in that iso.  It must be based on cooking, because I cannot get any version of cooking to work my keyboard, see my post " Slitaz Cooking Keyboard does not work"  posted today.

@stankingston

I tried to apply this ,,tazusb writfs lzma"-approach several times with different results.
On a laptop it worked with slitaz-cooking without any problem, with 3.0 as well.
With a Desktop-PC I only got rootfs.gz-files that were not bootable, causing a kernel panic each time. But I must confess that there are geometry problems with that machine: when installing Windows 7 drive /dev/sdb had to be put to the master drive in the BIOS. Since then there are grub-booting  issues around with different distros. So it is better to use a ,,clean" machine to test this features of slitaz.
In order to make software installations of slitaz persistent this is, in my humble opinion, a much better approach than the one SLAX uses. But as I understand it one should start without any home=/dev/sd... option, like
root (hd0,0)
kernel /boot/bzImage root=/dev/ram0 rw
initrd /boot/rootfs.gz
- and then a second time to use this installation like
kernel /boot/bzImage root=/dev/ram0 rw home=/dev/sda1
to obtain that /home/tux-directory.

@michaelkbischof said:
"I tried to apply this ,,tazusb writfs lzma"-approach several times with different results."
"With a Desktop-PC I only got rootfs.gz-files that were not bootable, causing a kernel panic each time."

I have same problem on desktop hard drive persistent live install of slitaz-3.0 core iso
tazusb writefs gzip works for me

Hi,
the announced feed back. Under slitaz-cooking I installed firefox to a frugal boot from (bzImage/rootfs.gz and then used
   tazusb writefs gzip
This time no kernel panic. So for this particular job gzip is the better friend to tazusb than lzma is.

Regards