[Tfug] OK, got a different tech challenge on FOSS voting...

[John Gruenenfelder]

On Sun, May 11, 2008 at 09:27:12PM -0700, Jim March wrote:
>   Let's say we have a LiveCD boot disk that contains Linux plus voting
>   application.  And at the end of the day it's going to burn data to a
>   CD, so that probably means a second CD drive needed?
>   FIRST question: is it possible to do a CD burn on a system that started
>   with a LiveCD?  (Have the machine be 3gig+ of RAM, create a RAMdisk,
>   copy CD crap to RAMdisk?, freeing the boot drive?  It would be fast as
>   hell in operation...)

I believe Knoppix and derivatives can do this.  And you don't need all that
much memory.  The compressed CD image is copied into memory and run from
there, still compressed.  Supposing they used the full CD, you could get by
with 1GB of RAM.  Say, 600-700MB for the CD leaving 300-400MB for the system
to run on.  If all you are running is a single voting program and then a CD
writer, that should be more than enough.

And that's with tons of software you'd never need on a single purpose
machine.  A cut down Knoppix CD, copied to RAM and run from there would work
on a 512MB machine, I'm sure.


-- 
--John Gruenenfelder    Research Assistant, UMass Amherst student
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