[conspire] (forw) Re: Linux install help? (For an old CoffeeNet regular?)

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Daniel Gimpelevich (daniel at gimpelevich.san-francisco.ca.us):

> Interestingly, that's almost the exact opposite of what I was trying to
> say. Puppy, DSL, and other compact distros _install_ as a compressed
> iso9660 loopback file, and otherwise run in a ramdisk.

Ah, thanks.  I'd definitely not caught your intended reference.

As always with stored-compressed, uncompress-on-the-fly-into-RAM
schemes, the main price you pay is in I/O performance loss because of
decompression overhead.  Personally, I'd find this to get old quickly.
There's a reason why we don't use that sort of storage routinely, i.e.,
when we're not desperately trying every possible trick to shave a few
bytes off storage.