Booting Fedora to RAM

So I installed Fedora 24 yesterday.  And while not the only option, the default installation CD is a live CD that boots up a Gnome desktop, and from there gives you the option to either just play around with Fedora or to run the installer application and install Fedora to your hard disk.

As an aside, I chose the Gnome live CD because that will install Gnome.  If another particular environment happens to be your thing, then you'll need to choose the appropriate live CD.  In Fedora land these are called spins, and you can find out more about them here.

And as another aside, while I don't always do it, a lot of times upon a new release of Fedora I'll force myself to switch up from Gnome to something different, until the next Fedora release or until I tire of it.  I suppose KDE might be the only environment I've actually stuck with for a full release cycle besides Gnome (I miss the more polished, integrated, and full featured applications too much I guess), but still, switching it up every now and again helps me not to stagnate I like to think.  Speaking of which, I should probably give xmonad (a tiling window manager) or the like a try for once.  Maybe I will this time around.

Anyhow, given my wealth of ram, it makes sense to me to, if at all possible, load my live CDs into RAM when I boot them.  This is easy to do with Fedora, though not as simple as I'd like it to be, namely it being a menu item.  But still pretty easy.  When presented with the initial live CD menu, hit the 'e' key to edit the menu entry.  Then append the kernel line with 'rd.live.ram'.  Hit ctrl-x to boot and you're set.  It will take a bit longer to boot of course as everything needs to be loaded into ram.

So what's the point?  If you're simply wanting to give a particular desktop a go, loading things into RAM will make everything much more responsive and way closer to to what the true desktop experience would be like.  But even if you're just performing an install, if you're like me you might need to fire up a terminal and do some low level pre-install or post-install tasks.  Or you might just want to bring up a browser or the like while you wait for the installation to finish.  Booting to RAM makes this so much more pleasant.

And a bit of trivia.  Though it wasn't exactly a live CD, older versions of Solaris were the first perhaps, the first install CDs I ever encountered anyway, where you could use a browser while you were waiting for the installer.  Quite neat back in the day.