Warning: Geek article, if you are not interested in Linux Live CD or Live USB systems, fly away !
While working on a live Linux USB key based on Debian 5.0 Lenny, I tried to make a minimal yet useful system to run anywhere.
I wanted something even lighter than XFCE and looking as much as possible like a Windows XP experience (You Linux Nerds out there, don't shoot me, I will not be the only user 
So I chose to use LXDE to replace Gnome/KDE/XFCE and since the Gnome GDM window manager still pulled a few megabytes of Gnome dependencies, I settled on using Slim as Window Manager for X11.
I wanted the live system to boot anywhere, so I had to pull in all the firmwares for wireless LAN cards and video cards.
Since I wanted to be able to use any kind of disk file systems, I also loaded approximately all filesystems I could think of (ntfs-3g, reiserfs, smbfs …).
To be able to support the brand new ext4 file system, I took a recent kernel from the undebian backports (2.6.29) and went on building my live USB system.
Of course, it will have to support persistence across reboots (unlike most live systems), so the system uses the live-helper and live-initramfs packages with live persistent option set by default with lh_config.
That's OK, it took a few nights to fix the thing, but still I had an issue where the LXDE file manager PCManFM would not mount my NTFS partitions !
I tried many many "solutions" (ArchLinux forums were a source of inspiration), and none would fix it: changing /etc/PolicyKit.conf , using ConsoleKit with Slim, and many more even less fun.
After 3 days, I still had the issue, and decided to go for a little debug, so I used the very useful strace utility; I still miss truss from Solaris, but you have to live with your time :).
I then saw that PCManFM after opening the /etc/fstab (logical place to find "mount" instructions), it tried to find any variant of gksudo or gksu (a lot of tentative Open system calls).
So I installed the gksu debian package, which includes gksudo ( sudo apt-get install gksu ), a final lh_build and a few hours later, "tada!" I have my live USB system ready for use.
Reboot and it works ! Rhâa lovely.
So I can go on and try to fill my 4Gb USB key with open source software…
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