Hi folks, first of all thanks for all your interesting answers! I didn't expect this topic to be so popular and I am quite satisfied to have received a broader perspective than I had in mind.
My fault was not specifying exactly what jobs the machine would perform, that could have narrowed down the possible answers. This machine is a special project as, in itself is both a mod and a low power box. It's purpose will be to be a "near-TV-set" server/client, doing stuff like torrent, sftp, ftp, dlna, web surfing, media playing, gns3, etc. It should use E17 as X desktop environment. The original idea was that it had to be at the same time: - small enough to fit a living room without being noticed - not power hungry (very likely to be often 24h on) - kinda stylish The stylish hull came from a dead SparcClassic which has been completely overhauled internally to fit a miniITX board and externally (painted in lucid black, original leds, metal plates with "Sun" and "SparcClassic" preserved), instead of a floppy drive it now features a CF reader which gives you the ability of "taking away the OS with you" whenever you want like the keys of a car. The box is sleek enough to fit any living room being woman-scream proof and at the same time capable of potentially hosting two HD, one 5" 1/4 and one 3" 1/2. After having read all the answers, I have excluded options which are read only or modify the system so much that render it unsupported in a major way, making also upgrades like gambling. This machine will be running -release. What I had more or less in mind, which buys the ticket, is what Marko and Kenneth have suggested, so using mfs_mount with -P and rsyncing at shutdown or even at regular intervals. I see this as the best compromise between a totally ro system with unsupported upgrades and a bare CF- install without being certain of timings for media wear-off. I would also like to minimise the CF-upgrade process through time: it is time consuming and, with a consistent policy to reduce CF writes, likely unnecessary. The solution will look like the following: - CF for / with mfs_mount -P for all /var - 5" 1/4 HD for /home and swap - 3" 1/2 HD somewhere inder /mnt for write intensive jobs, like for instance torrent - an extra rpm-regulated case side fan to exhaust extra heat if present Still cannot understand why some of you have adviced to put /dev on ramdisk: isn't MAKEDEV just run at install time and then only manually? >From what emerged in the discussion it looks that, besides /home, /var is the only place where system makes its usual writes. Btw, thanks for the suggestions about reconciling syslog with security checks! Looks like I have the instruments to proceed now, pictures of the SparcClassic mod are available in private for the curious ones. Thanks!!!
