1) I said I will not install it to the hard drive. What I really meant was I will not run it from the hard drive.

I realize it would take a large amount of ram. As I said, it could be a nice excuse to build a large-ram machine.

I also realize that I will not run most programs regularly. However, being in the learning phase, I will run most of them atleast a few times.

I do not plan on rebooting very often so waiting for the hard drive to write its OS to ram would be acceptable to me. Plus I do not think it would take very long even if 2+ GB of data were transfered.

I would also like to see what realworld benifits there are to running an OS off ram. I would imagine it could be very fast. I'm just trying to learn.

I was thinking maybe I would uncompress the Live CD. Then store the uncompressed CD as a (much larger) ISO DVD. I could then copy the ISO to the hard drive and write to ram every ensuing boot.

As I said before. I am learning and am resonably sure I will, in the not to distant future, run other distros (probabaly debian) but for now I will play with knoppix.