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Anyone have some recommendations for a live distro that can run from ram? It'd be nice to have a live image that I can put on a partition, that I can then dele

Anyone have some recommendations for a live distro that can run from ram? It'd be nice to have a live image that I can put on a partition, that I can then delete the partition out from under while doing a bootstrap onto that same disk. Very useful on cloud instances that aren't great about letting you bring your own ISO. I had some weird debian-live scripts thst tried doing a tmpfs & copying a btrfs snapshot onto it and launching that, but I never felt great about it, quite a hack.

eisbaw 11mo ago
I would think anything that works with PXE network boot would qualify. For cloud stuff, nixos-anywhere.
LorenDB 11mo ago
Puppy Linux should do this IIRC.
isr 11mo ago
There are many which could fit your description. Tiny core, puppy linux varients (voidpup, with the void pkg manager, is pretty nice), etc. However, I think the nicest put together ones are fatdog64 & porteus. fatdog64 is built from scratch (basically, "Beyond Linux From Scratch"), but uses a lot of slackware tooling & ethos, so its quite compatible with slack pkgs & slackbuilds. If you dive deeper, its actually got a lovely cohesive design, behind the minimalistic gui which IMHO does it a huge disservice. Eg: it has scripts to run containerised or UML'ised versions of itself, from within itself. Down to optionally having a nested X session with full gui. Porteus (or the more bleeding edge Porteux variant) has more conventional look & feel out of the box. Both Fatdog & Porteus(x) have much more flexible initrd systems than tiny core/puppy, where you can copy configs in from a static location (rather like alpine's overlay tarball), or bind mount stuff in. Critically, this is all before the main rootfs goes live, so you can affect how various disks & services are handled on a machine-by-machine basis, if needed. (plus they're not restricted to the root-only approach which puppy needlessly adheres to religiously) Plus, these were the original IMMUTABLE distro's, long before that was adopted by some distro-giants. In other words, with a little thought, you have TONS of flexibility. Including the scenario you mentioned. To get a flavour, have a quick look over - [the fatdog faq](https://distro.ibiblio.org/fatdog/web/faqs/faq.html https://distro.ibiblio.org/fatdog/web/faqs/faq.html) - [this old blog post] (https://www.lightofdawn.org/wiki/wiki.cgi/FatdogIsVersatile https://www.lightofdawn.org/wiki/wiki.cgi/FatdogIsVersatile) PS: to install either, it can be as simple as setting up a bootloader (which IMHO ought to be a distro agnostic task anyway), and copying over ... 2 files (by default, fatdog shoves its main rootfs squashfs module INSIDE the initrd). With porteus, you will have a fully setup xfce, cinnamon or gnome (yes) setup with ... 4 files.
- jauntywundrkind 11mo ago
  Edit: Puppy Linux does seem to boot to ram! Huzzah. Interesting thread that goes over some behaviors available: https://oldforum.puppylinux.com/viewtopic.php?t=36508 https://oldforum.puppylinux.com/viewtopic.php?t=36508 The unique problem here is that while many of these are designed to run nicely from USB drive, I don't get the impression that many will let you remove the USB drive after boot. FatDog talks about running from a RAM layer, which is cool. But I believe even this is still a RW layer atop the underlying root which needs to remain mounted.
  - isr 11mo ago
    Nope, puppy (all variants), fatdog, and porteus (all variants, including porteux & nemesis - which is arch based) can all boot in a mode where you can unplug/unmount the storage device from which it booted. (as can tiny core, alpine, etc)
fuzztester 11mo ago
Finnix itself can do that. See linked article.

eisbaw 11mo ago

I would think anything that works with PXE network boot would qualify. For cloud stuff, nixos-anywhere.

LorenDB 11mo ago

Puppy Linux should do this IIRC.

isr 11mo ago

There are many which could fit your description. Tiny core, puppy linux varients (voidpup, with the void pkg manager, is pretty nice), etc. However, I think the nicest put together ones are fatdog64 & porteus. fatdog64 is built from scratch (basically, "Beyond Linux From Scratch"), but uses a lot of slackware tooling & ethos, so its quite compatible with slack pkgs & slackbuilds. If you dive deeper, its actually got a lovely cohesive design, behind the minimalistic gui which IMHO does it a huge disservice. Eg: it has scripts to run containerised or UML'ised versions of itself, from within itself. Down to optionally having a nested X session with full gui. Porteus (or the more bleeding edge Porteux variant) has more conventional look & feel out of the box. Both Fatdog & Porteus(x) have much more flexible initrd systems than tiny core/puppy, where you can copy configs in from a static location (rather like alpine's overlay tarball), or bind mount stuff in. Critically, this is all before the main rootfs goes live, so you can affect how various disks & services are handled on a machine-by-machine basis, if needed. (plus they're not restricted to the root-only approach which puppy needlessly adheres to religiously) Plus, these were the original IMMUTABLE distro's, long before that was adopted by some distro-giants. In other words, with a little thought, you have TONS of flexibility. Including the scenario you mentioned. To get a flavour, have a quick look over - [the fatdog faq](https://distro.ibiblio.org/fatdog/web/faqs/faq.html https://distro.ibiblio.org/fatdog/web/faqs/faq.html) - [this old blog post] (https://www.lightofdawn.org/wiki/wiki.cgi/FatdogIsVersatile https://www.lightofdawn.org/wiki/wiki.cgi/FatdogIsVersatile) PS: to install either, it can be as simple as setting up a bootloader (which IMHO ought to be a distro agnostic task anyway), and copying over ... 2 files (by default, fatdog shoves its main rootfs squashfs module INSIDE the initrd). With porteus, you will have a fully setup xfce, cinnamon or gnome (yes) setup with ... 4 files.

jauntywundrkind 11mo ago
Edit: Puppy Linux does seem to boot to ram! Huzzah. Interesting thread that goes over some behaviors available: https://oldforum.puppylinux.com/viewtopic.php?t=36508 https://oldforum.puppylinux.com/viewtopic.php?t=36508 The unique problem here is that while many of these are designed to run nicely from USB drive, I don't get the impression that many will let you remove the USB drive after boot. FatDog talks about running from a RAM layer, which is cool. But I believe even this is still a RW layer atop the underlying root which needs to remain mounted.
- isr 11mo ago
  Nope, puppy (all variants), fatdog, and porteus (all variants, including porteux & nemesis - which is arch based) can all boot in a mode where you can unplug/unmount the storage device from which it booted. (as can tiny core, alpine, etc)

fuzztester 11mo ago

Finnix itself can do that. See linked article.