Kids web-kiosk running entirely in RAMDISK

[xerxesb]

After a couple of days, I've managed to get something working.

It's not exactly what you were suggesting Ted, but it's also a combination of that and a lot of other posts i've read.

Basically, it starts with a frugal install. Then when i'm remastering, i provide a few changes to system files
1. I modified the rc.shutdown to not save any session information. This means any changes in that session won't be persisted and it will restore to the "clean" state every boot.
2. I modified rc.local to umount /dev/sda1. I'm not sure if this is required anymore, but I still have it.
3. I changed the GRUB menu to boot with pfix=ram to force the RAMDISK, but i'm not sure if this is required anymore given the next change
4. I modified the initrd.gz to force puppy to boot in PUPMODE=0. This tricks it into thinking it's running from the LiveCD for the first run, and won't mount any disk-drives either RO or RW. Now if my son turns off the computer without shutting down, the drive won't need a fsck.
5. I then modified ~/.xinitrc to NOT call /usr/sbin/delayedrun, and instead just execute the contents of the ~/Startup directory (this is the last thing that delayedrun does). This prevents the initial "welcome" splash screen, the getting-started HTML page and the "woof" audio.

After remastering from LiveUSB, i just drop the newly created lupu-510.sfs into my frugal install folder and it's done.

Thanks everyone for your suggestions! If you can see a problem with anything i've done, i'd appreciate the feedback

[Q5sys]

What i'd like to do is install and run puppy from the local HDD, but unmount the HDD after everything has been loaded into the ramdisk.

Contrary to what you may have read, the save file that acts as your persistent storage is NOT loaded into RAM. It is mounted, so you cannot unmount it during a session.

Read here for some ideas.

It is possible to load a save file into ram to run... but of course no settings are changed at shutdown. I took some of Jeminah's work and made it an option in Attackpup... but Im not at home so I'm not able to show you how I did it.
It required having a 2nd initrd with a modified init script.

Honestly, a remaster is the simplest solution.