I bought a 1U server recently, and I forgot to purchase a SSD to actually hold data. Since I couldn’t hold my excitement to play with the server, I decided to load an operating system entirely into RAM and never turn it off for the meantime.

I browsed List of Linux Distributoins that run from RAM and found Slax a debian derivative.

It’s not what I would use for my daily driver but in terms of doing this task its perfect. It loads up quickly and lets me perform nice basic user functions. It’s also based on debian so I have a whole repository of packages available I can install.

Now by default, if you’re on a USB it’ll try to run in a persistent mode, just press ESC in the boot splash to have the option to copy to ram.