I just tried installing from CD to HD on my test system, and noticed that I was tapping my foot for a good 15 minutes while the contents of the CD were transferred over. I was thinking that it would take this long to boot up every time if we actually set the sytem up to pull from CD into RAM each time. It got me thinking of how to get around that, and I had another cool idea. Picture this:

Your hard drive contains the following parititions:
- a 300 MB swap partition
- a ?? GB /home partition
- a 700 MB /fastload partition

The /home partition would contain all your user files that you want to be persistant between sessions. (Mozilla bookmarks, OpenOffice documents, movies, songs, etc.) The /fastload partition would contain a copy of the ISO image from the CD. Then we could boot off the CD, load the kernel and some copy commands into RAM, and copy the contents of the CD from the HD image to create our filesystem in RAM, like we did before. Perhaps it would make sense to have a small /boot partition which would contain a kernel and some copy commands to put everything into memory. Then we wouldn't need to boot from CD each time.

OK, so now by pulling the filesystem from the HD instead of from the CD, we should have cut our boot time dramatically. Then I started thinking about keeping the system up to date. Perhaps if we downloaded a new package into our /home directory, we might be able to run a new command. "apt-get upgrade -kpx-double" or something similar. It would work the way you expect it to: it would update the filesystem in RAM with the contents of the new package -- but then it would mount the ISO image in /fastload, chroot over there, and update the package there too. That way the next time you reboot your system, you won't lose the changes that you made to the packages. This would have two, rather nice effects:

1) Knoppix could set up a system for distributing patches instead of users downloading a new ISO image every 3 days. That would cut down on their bandwidth, thus cutting their expenses.

2) At any time while running Knoppix, you could burn a new CD from the ISO that's in /fastboot, which would have all your updates applied to it. Not only would this be convenient for sharing with friends, but it would probably spawn a bunch of special purpose Knoppix clones. One might focus on Gnome, another might focus on Multimedia apps, etc.

I've been rambling much too long now. Obviously I'm talking about things that I only understand a little about, but I had such a nice response to my first post, that I thought I would throw these ideas out there and see what happened. That's the purpose of this forum right?