 Today we're going to be talking about running Linux completely from RAM. What do I mean by that? So when you're running a live distro of Linux either off a USB flash drive a CD or a DVD or even an image off hard drive That thing is running in RAM that thing that distro is running in RAM But it's pulling information off that disk whether it's the CD or flash drive So everything's loaded to RAM as you use it, but as you're requesting files off the distribution It's coming from the disk which nowadays, you know off a flash drive especially reading at least is fairly fast But especially back in the day when it came to CDs and DVDs it could be fairly slow So if you go out the whole thing to RAM it's faster also a benefit of running everything out of RAM is Normally when you boot off a USB flash drive or CD you got to leave that disk in the computer Well, if you boot everything to RAM You can take the the USB flash drive or CD out and the whole thing will still run You don't need that drive in there anymore, which is nice So we have speed as a benefit. We have the benefit of not having the disk in the system But also if you're really paranoid you can have a diskless system where you just have the RAM So normally when you're running off a USB flash drive a lot of times it's a read-only image So nothing's being written to the disk unless you set up some sort of persistent mode But if you really want to make sure that nothing is being saved that drive having no drives in the computer is nice Everything's written to RAM. So as soon as you turn off the computer, you know that everything's going to be cleared out So what are the downsides to booting to RAM? Well one, longer boot time because you got to wait for the entire image To be copied to RAM. So if you have a distro that's a gig or two gigs Depending on the speed of the flash drive and your computer it might add 30 seconds a minute or even two minutes to the boot time as it loads everything to RAM Another downside is if you're limited on RAM You're now using up a lot more of your RAM as dist... So let's say you have four gigs of RAM and you have a distribution that the image is two gigs Well, you just used half of your RAM just to load up your system now You're only running with two gigs worth of RAM which especially if you're downloading stuff could fill up fairly quickly Because remember you're not using hard drive. You're running from RAM. So that's a downside Especially, you know working with older machines now some distributions automatically boot to RAM especially lightweight distributions I believe puppy Linux does DSL does that's darn small Linux will say that Another one is Slitaz Linux. How do you pronounce Slitaz? How to pronounce comm Slitaz. Slitaz? Slitaz. Slitaz? That doesn't sound right. Oh, how to pronounce comm forward slash French I think it's a French distro. Slitaz. Slitaz. Slitaz. Slitaz. Slitaz. Slitaz. Slitaz. Oh, the official forms for Slitaz. How to say Slitaz Slitaz is an acronym. It is I had no clue for simple lightweight incredible temporary autonomous Zone is that really what it stands for? I had no clue Here's another answer how to say Slitaz. You don't say it. Yeah use it some other distributions such as MX Linux When you boot up if you go into advanced options, there's an option to boot from RAM grandma Linux I think I don't know how you say it GRML Linux also has an option in the menu But not all distributions have the option to boot to RAM in a selectable option So today we're going to look at how to boot those distributions from RAM now. I mainly stick with Debian distributions I'm not sure if this how this works with other distributions But basically we're just going to pass a flag to the kernel to say boot everything from RAM and it's super simple We're going to do it with a few different distributions. So let's go ahead and have a quick look We're going to start out with grandma Linux again This is one of those distributions that does give you the option if we go to boot options We can choose that and we can go down to load to RAM So it's going to start the boot process and here in a moment. You'll see that right here It's copying over the file system 43 percent 68 percent 100 percent So at this point if I was running on a physical machine I could unplug the USB flash drive or eject the CD this distribution is the smaller version It's only about a half a gig and again I'm running a virtual machine so copy to her fairly quickly But again the speed of a copying to your RAM will depend on your machine and your flash drive But it does add to the time but now everything is running completely from RAM And I just had to choose that selection from the menu So here we're working with MX Linux and down the bottom here You'll see F4 gives you options if I hit F4 You can see that there is an option to RAM when I click that and then I start booting It will now load to RAM and again this a bigger distribution So it will take a little bit longer to copy to RAM about two gigs again I'm working in a virtual machine so it's going pretty quickly But once this little process here is done in real life If I was working with physical hardware I could unplug a USB flash drive or a CD RAM So again here's another distribution that gives you that option in the boot options where you can just select So moving on to distributions that don't give you the options in the menu Here we are with Ubuntu so I'm booting Ubuntu or however you say it and you can see we have try or install Now you'll notice right here. We have the option E to edit So I'm gonna hit E and here we have our boot options And right down here where it says Linux This is your Linux kernel and these are the options you're passing to it. All you have to do is somewhere in this line We're gonna write to RAM all one word just like that And that's all I have to do and then you can hit F10 to continue But I'm gonna erase where it says splash and quiet so we can see what's going on Otherwise, you don't see it just gives you the little process that it's booting, but it doesn't show you everything I'm gonna go ahead and hit F10 now and you'll see in a moment It will say copying to RAM or it's gonna be mounting some RAM So yeah copying live media to RAM and it shows you the command. It's running It doesn't give you a nice progress bar like the other distributions do but once this is done copying to RAM We'll have a system loaded to RAM. So here we are with a Debian live distribution Now there is an advanced options here, but there's no option to Boot to RAM so we'll go back and we'll go up to the default option here now in some distributions You hit E but you look right here It says right at the bottom of the screen tab to edit the menu entry So we'll hit tab and it gives us the menu option here You see Linux it's giving us the kernel and again all you do is hit space to RAM and I can go ahead at this point and hit enter to continue now It does have the quiet splash screen so if I hit that it's going to show a splash screen again Just like Ubuntu would but you can hit delete on the keyboard and it will show you what's going on And here we go. It's copying the file system to RAM. It does give you a percentage bar unlike Ubuntu I don't know why Ubuntu doesn't I guess it's just Ubuntu, but here we go. We can see 71 percent 80 percent 93 percent and now we are copy to RAM and again I could remove that disk if I was booting to actual hardware So you can see just adding to the kernel options that to RAM option will allow you to boot to RAM Let's try another distribution. Here we are now with Linux Mint again Read what it says on the screen, but as you can see in this case We're gonna hit E to edit and just like on Ubuntu will go down to the line with Linux We'll go to the end and just in here whoops will type to RAM again You can remove the quiet and splash so you don't get the splash screen But if you accidentally continue which in this case you can hit control X or F10 Just read what it says on the screen and it will tell you what to do I'll go ahead and hit F10 It will start to boot if the splash screen comes up and I want to see what's going on All I have to do is hit there's different keys file hit delete and here just like Ubuntu since this distribution of Linux Mint is based on Ubuntu It's not going to give you a percentage on how much is copied But you can see here that it is mounting some RAM attempt file system and then it will load to RAM And now you're running from RAM. So there you have it Now you can boot your distributions of Linux completely to RAM with no hard disks whatsoever Including the drive that contained the original file system now some distributions again Do it automatically usually smaller distributions some will give you the options menu But now even if they don't give you the option in the menu You know how to get it to boot to RAM at least again on Debian based systems I would assume this would be the same on other distributions of links that aren't Debian based since this is a Kernel flag and we're just passing this information to the kernel But I haven't tested out unlike arch based distributions or you know fedora or anything like that But give it a try let me know in the comments if you try on one of these other distributions And let me know if it works or doesn't work. So I thank you for watching again My website is filmsbychrist.com. I'm Chris. That's Chris with a K link in the description I also have a patreon page to support me through Libre pay pay pal I thank you for watching liking sharing subscribing commenting all that good stuff. And as always, I hope that you have a great day