heyo, everyone!
i just recently put together an awful computer using parts salvaged from the broken desktops of my friend's parents and grandparents (and, in one case, from a police department, which had confiscated it XD). i don't have a hard drive for this computer because the PATA drive i purchased second hand was broken and i didn't feel like getting another, so it's booting off of usb at the moment (this itself took me a while to figure out, as the BIOS is from 2002 and didn't support usb, so i had to use a plop bootloader cd). this setup works, at least, but it's a bit slow and i don't want to wear out my flash drive immediately. my question(tl;dr), then, is this:

how can i set my LXDE desktop to copy itself to RAM upon startup, like a liveCD, so things will be faster and the drive won't fail as quickly? i know that i can use Unetbootin to make the flash drive behave like a live cd, but i want to be able to turn this feature on and off so that, if need be, i can still install programs at a later date. is this possible?

well, the most effective way would involve modifying the scripts that load it to first make a tmpfs and load everything on a squashed filesystem into ram, and have it copy it back upon shutdown. It's far easier to just have the USB as a liveCD though.

after a bit of looking around, i realised that i was being a bit derpulous in wanting to mount everything to RAM, as that would be a bit huge and wouldn't fit. instead, i just set up a tmpfs for /tmp, /var/tmp, etcetera, set noatime, and made writeback commit less often.

Excellent, that's a very good solution. Sorry that I didn't get a chance to respond to this topic before you figured it out. And now is exactly the wrong time to be looking for hard drives, as you may have figured out, thanks to the flooding in Thailand that is many hard drive prices skyrocket.

I've got an entire Ubuntu distribution (using Gnome) to boot from ram (1GiB). But this was quite some work, and updating the system itself was quite complex, because you would need to create a whole new squashfs every time (since its Read Only).