Some questions regarding live CDs.

[inha]

I get the general idea on how they work but there are some things that are unclear to me.
I just downloaded the Gnoppix live CD to take with me when I visit my folks during christmas so I won't be stuck on XP while I'm there.

Here's what I'm wondering. Programs are uncompressed on the fly but where do they save the temporary data? Let's say that I'm going to waste my time on some webpages, where do the cookies get saved? How can I watch videos that aren't streamed? If there is no linux partition on the HD how does this work? How does temporary data get handled when one is on a live distro?

[fjleal]

Live distros often use a ramdrive - some space in ram is allocated as if it was a hard disk partition. And that's where temporary data is stored.

[LinuxHippy]

if your folks have a lotta memory, try booting into knoppix by having it load everything into RAM. It'll take longer to boot, but once it's up it is really fast. I cannot help you with the command from the boot prompt (my knoppix cd is at work). All the boot commands can be found by pressing F1 instead of ENTER at the boot screen. I think there's also a command to boot saved settings from a floppy disk.

[inha]

512MB if I remember correct. The gnoppix cd iso was 600 something megs but it includes windows versions of some opensource software so the OS itself is smaller.

Thanks for the info guys.