I am building a backup server machine and I'm trying to minimise its power requirements.
Originally I was going to give it two disk drives, one small one for the OS and a big one for the backups. There's space for more drives as/when the backups run out of space.
I then though that maybe I could put the OS on a USB stick to save the power consumption of the small OS drive. Not going to be fast but saves a significant amount of power.
Then I thought even further and, as the system I'm thinking of using for this has 8Gb or RAM installed why not run the OS from the RAM? I don't need/want a GUI, this is going to be a headless machine running just a basic installation plus rsync and a few utilities. Access will be by SSH.
So, what distributions are there that would be easy to do this with? Requirements are basically:-
Must have a non-GUI installation option that fits in a few Gb.
Preferably designed to work like this so installation is simple and can be kept up to date without doing wierd things.
Ideally Debian based as I'm familiar with it, but it's not vital.
What I'm looking for is something that boots off a USB stick but doesn't use the USB stick once up and running, at least not for frequent writes. Loading programs off the USB is OK I guess.