Hello guys,
Is there a way or a distro for loading Mint in RAM and the booting from there?

I would say no. RAM is only available to the OS, because the OS controls the MMU. So no OS, no MMU, no RAM.

jlinkels

I reckon thats how most "Live" distributions work. The kernel, etc is loaded into a RAMdisk and is run from there. It pages apps in and out as you call them (You can hear the CD/DVD chugging when you call up the App.)

Distributions like Puppy, with a very small footprint, are completely RAM based, or so I believe.

My

Play Bonny!

MX-14 and AntiX have the frugal install feature which loads to ram.

Misunderstood the question. No computer boots from ram. That being said. The operating booting from hard drive can be loaded to ram to run faster. But Hard Drive, USB, or DVD/CD (like in Puppy) is needed as boot media before loading operating system into ram.

Hello and welcome to LQ.

Kind of two issues. One is load the (a normally compressed image) image to ram or as noted above a sort of fuse aufs that combines ram with real media.


Generally some distro's have boot options. I don't know of a boot time option on Mint that tells "TORAM" or one of the other names that loads the image into ram then allows you to remove media/boot.

You could use one of the guides for Knoppix or others that have this feature. Since the name toram is not constant and some boot options are not always easy to find you will have to search.

There may be some long way around ways.

Not sure about this list either but may be correct. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...t_run_from_RAM

There a air force distro that I think does this too.

Yes, you can use grub2 to load the Mint .iso to ram, and run the live Mint, and install Mint.
You can use grub2 installed to your hard drive, or install grub2 to a USB drive.
I recently wrote 2 tutorials detailing those processes.


Boot a Mint .iso From Your Hard Drive Using Grub2 - with no DVD or USB -
http://community.linuxmint.com/tutorial/view/1849

How to create a USB which boots multiple .iso files using Grub2 -
http://community.linuxmint.com/tutorial/view/1846

To clarify a bit on this: the toram option of some distributions is checked in the init script of the initrd/initramfs of those distributions and when found starts a procedure that, somewhat simplified, does nothing more than copying the filesystem (or its container) into a tmpfs, and then switching the root file system to that instead of using a disk partition as root filesystem (or a compressed image with a union file system, in case of live CD's).
If anyone is interested in how this works I recommend to read the init script of the initrd of SystemRescueCD, it is well documented and helped me greatly to understand how that works and how easy it actually is to do something like that with any distribution (given that you have enough RAM to load the filesystem into it and run the applications you want).

No you can't do that.BTW,there are several light-weight distros such as Puppy or even lighter - DSL(Damn Small Linux)

@OP: Yes I load MINT MATE via Live USB on a lightweight ATOM laptop that has 1G of memory and no hard drive, because the hard drive died and I never replaced it.