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Run totally in RAM isolated from PC

August 18, 2019 — BarryK

I posted about this new feature yesterday:

http://bkhome.org/news/201908/easyos-booting-up-totally-in-ram.html

Now for some snapshots...

There is a new entry in the boot menu, "Copy session to RAM & disable drives":

img1

At first bootup, choose the top entry, for normal bootup. Then setup networking, firewall, video resolution, and whatever else. At the next bootup, choose "Copy session to RAM & disable drives". This will copy 'easy.sfs' and the previous session into RAM, and switch_root onto a desktop running totally in RAM.

At the switch_root, Linux Capabilities are dropped, to disable accessing of drives. This also disables containers. So, we see a very clean desktop:

img2

With everything in RAM, EasyOS runs super fast. The isolation from the PC drives means that there is no risk of intruder contamination -- when you poweroff, it is all gone, it never happened.

However, you might want to save something. For example, I took a snapshot of the desktop. The current configuration of dropped Linux Capabilities allows saving to a USB-drive or any removable drive, by plugging it in, or replugging it. I replugged the USB-stick that had booted off, and was then able to mount a partition and save the snapshot.

I can see this as being my everyday bootup choice when I just want to surf the web and not risk any contamination of my PC. A nice feature of the REFind boot manager is that it remembers the last menu choice, and sets that as the default -- very convenient.

The above snapshot shows a new theme. I would like to acknowledge forum member Argolance, who sent me a theme that he had developed. I have used that as the base for a new theme for Easy Buster. Argolance provided the icons, wallpaper, and window-manager themes, that I modified slightly to suit my taste.

Argolance, thanks for that! I didn't really like the theme for Easy Buster 2.0, thought it was too bright.  Expect 2.1 very soon, probably tomorrow. 

Tags: easy