Given that a lot of systems are capable of a gig or more of memory, what
about running a flash drive with the distro installed to the flash, and
either setting the swap to use a RAM drive, or even running the full distro
in a RAM drive?  Obviously, this deviates quite a bit from what the thread
started as and I'm not suggesting this as a solution to his question.  Seems
that it could easily solve the problem of repeated writes to the flash.

eric

On 11/15/06, Joseph Sinclair <plug-discussion@stcaz.net> wrote:

> You could, but the system would usually put swap on the root
> partition.  Since swap is a lot of writes, and many flash-memory drives
> don't survive large numbers of writes, it is known to destroy the
> flash-memory drive.
>
> The advantage of the systems that are designed to use flash-memory is that
> they minimize the writes to flash-memory (usually only on shutdown), thus
> preserving it.  There are a number of systems designed this way, but the
> most popular are Puppy and DSL (both of which are often used in systems that
> boot and run entirely from a CF card), but there are some others.
>