From The Chakra Project - Wiki

Why would a person choose to use this method?

• A distro that has great hardware detection every time you boot

• A distro that runs out of RAM

• A distro that if you make a mistake when you are trying to modify something, you can just shut down and no changes are saved

• An "install" that uses about 1/2 the space of a regular install.

You don't need to have an ext2/3 partition. It can be anything read by grub (i.e. fat 32)... I am not sure if you use the usb-image. I did a quirky thing where I just copied the files from the cd iso to a drive and made a grub entry for it, since I already had grub installed on the mbr on the disk.

Boot time is about 35 seconds on my full sized laptop. I think part of this is that it is reading a squashfs to load the system and the files are less "fragmented." Running out of RAM has it's advantages as well. The HD light only flickers when a new program is launched for a given session. It is great on an SSD this way... where it is mostly "read" and only written to during a session save.

The downside and how to "fix" it: After installing assorted packages and creating a user for myself, I had a mods overlay that was over 200 MB and close to 75000 files were being being saved and this took several minutes to save. Now I am down to a less than a 1 minute session save with 3500 files with under a minute and here is how:

Courtesy of user gradgrind at Arch, with some modifications that i use:

I would recommend doing this from another linux system with aufs and squashfs support, but if you copy the mods.sqf and system.sqf somewhere else and do the mounting, it does work while running Chakra. (tunnel into hidden files in the root directory /.livesys/medium/ and just copy the files to another device for mounting) NOTE: It seems since the latest kernel, you will have to do this running from either the latest Arch or Chakra Alpha 2. The squashfs files created for/by the Chakra Alpha 2 are not mountable in Chakra Alpha 1 or even Ubuntu Intrepid at this time. Just boot with the live CD then once the desktop comes up, insert your bootable Chakra (Arch) usb drive and connect your (path-to-new-place) drive. You will need another drive or partition with maybe 1.3 GB of free space to accomplish this.

   mkdir /home/username/system
   mkdir /home/username/mods
   mkdir /home/username/union
   mksquashfs /home/username/mods /path-to-new-place/mods.sqf
   sudo mount -o loop -t squashfs /path-to-originalsystem.sqf  /home/username/system
   sudo mount -o loop -t squashfs /path-to-originalmods.sqf /home/username/mods
   sudo mount -t aufs -o br:mods=rr+wh:system=rr aufs  /home/username/union
   sudo mksquashfs  /home/username/union  /path-to-new-place/system.sqf
   umount /home/username/union
   umount /home/username/mods
   umount  /home/username/system

Booted into something else: Copy the original mods and system to another location then copy the new files to the Chakra device. Boot back into Chakra and enjoy a very small overlay:-)

I did the copying once successfully issuing a "sudo cp" and it did work, but I don't suggest it if you have the live cd (or another bootable usb Chakra device) you can boot into to do this.