Quote:
Originally Posted by haertig
For that use, you might even want to consider booting from a thumbdrive. Either MX Linux or AntiX have great capabilities for thumbdrive boot. Make sure the thumbdrive is USB 3 and plugged into a USB 3 port on your computer. On boot, choose the option to load the entire OS into RAM. You can then remove the thumbdrive after boot and run totally out of RAM. One, this runs faster than snot, and two, you don't have to worry about any malware because everything is only in RAM. As soon as you power down, everything is gone. If you want to save something you can always leave the thumbdrive in place or connect a different storage peripheral and mount that temporarily. Or email the files to yourself, or copy them to a cloud drive, or whatever. You can "install" additional programs after boot and these are "installed" into RAM only.
You can boot from a "clean" OS on the thumbdrive, install the programs that you always want available - Calibre and whatever else - then write these back to the thumbdrive. MX and AntiX call this "remastering". From then on your thumbdrive boot will include all these extra programs that you added.
Another good use for this, especially for people that are security conscious, is to boot to RAM, install a new potentially suspect program, give it a quick run through, then examine the "layer" of RAM on "top" of the initial OS boot (these thumbdrive boots use a "layered filesystem"). You can easily see everything that has happened on your computer - things added, deleted or changed - since boot by looking at the appropriate layer only.
Booting totally into RAM is also mandatory, IMHO, if you are venturing onto the Dark Web. There is lots of good and legit stuff on the Dark Web even though most people think it's all bad and criminal. But you do have to be aware that all normal safeguards are off in that world, and control your behavior appropriately. One part of appropriate behavior is to do everything only in RAM so it all disappears when you reboot.
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Booting from RAM has intrigued me ever since I stumbled across Slax linux, I keep meaning to create a bootable USB of Slax and give it go, I must get round to doing it. Personally I would never touch the Dark Web as I'm not computer literate enough so would probably be opening myself up to a world of hurt!
