Thierry de Coulon wrote:

> I simply downloaded the latest Raspbian after an older openSUSE for Pi
> would not even boot ( in the mean time I got a better understanding of the
> differences between the pi and "normal" computers). lsb_release answers
> Raspbian GNU/Linux 8.0 (Jessie)

I have one of the older PIs available with 512MB RAM - if I am not mistaken
it has the ARM6 cpu. I also had to read about the boot process and used the
raspbian repo.
What I found really practical is the NFS boot. So I can boot with a
128/256/512MB card and have whatever I want on the NFS. Unfortunately I
found out that 256/512MB of RAM is not sufficient to run X and didn'T make
it to try TDE either, but this approach was pretty easy and fast compared
to having all of this on a card.

I could easily copy the root directory to a card anyway, whenever needed, or
perhaps on usb stick as PI cares only about the boot partition and you can
tell your initrd where to find the root.

Perhaps this could be useful to you as well.

regards