Hacker News Reader

Comment by boogies | Hacker News Reader

I use a similar distro, Puppy, because it has the ability to copy its squashed file system (SFS) files to RAM and then continue running with the persistent storage medium detached.

It has certain peculiarities like defaulting to logging in and running everything other than web browsers as root, so I’d like to switch to Tinycore if it’s different in that respect. My main concern is package availability — Puppy is compatible with the repos of major distros like Ubuntu.

View on HN

Puppy is very interesting in that at first glance the distro comes of as sort of a toy distro. But then when you look closer at the files system and the security ramifications related to that, it's a very serious distro.

In what way? Web browsers running under root do not inspire confidence.

"everything other than web browsers"

> In what way?

The file system.

Ubuntu (a quite a few other distros) can be made to run entirely from RAM (that's how the LiveCDs actually work). It's probably not as easy to configure are Puppy or Tinycore, but it's possible.

That's different than what the GP said.

I'm pretty sure you can't boot into an Ubuntu live disk, detach the usb, and keep using the system without any errors or loss of functionality.

That was what I thought too, thanks to abdullahkhalids for linking to the askubuntu thread that shows — with the right boot flag — you actually can https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25172520

Yes, in fact it's pretty easy. You just add the right arguments to GRUB, though I don't remember them off-hand.

I used to have a flash drive with GRUB installed, and several "Live CD" ISOs. It would have two options per ISO: the second would copy the squashfs to a ramdisk before boot.

Tinycore is especially great when you don't have USB3 available, because you don't have to wait minutes for >1GB of data to be copied to RAM.

toram is the parameter to add to the GRUB kernel directive.

It's as simple as adding a single boot parameter to grub

https://askubuntu.com/questions/829917/can-i-boot-a-live-usb...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com