Run Levels, Bare-Bone Shells, And Ram Wiping

[LinuxLive]

I have a ram wiper I want use at shutdown (BleachBit) Can anyone give advice on the best way to slowly shutdown to most bare-bone environment possible in order to free as much RAM as possible and then run the ram wiper? I was thinking run levels. I was also wondering what services could I stop to free memory that would not cripple the system but take it down as far as possible. But possibly there is a better approach?

[unspawn]

Have a look at https://tails.boum.org/contribute/de...emory_erasure/ and the rest of https://tails.boum.org/contribute/index.en.html and https://tails.boum.org/doc/index.en.html?

[Rubberman]

As root, use init or telinit to switch to text mode (shutting down the X server and GUI's) and then switch to single-user mode (shutting down all other user processes). Then you can shut down unnecessary services or root background processes that may still be running. At this point, just the kernel, your shell, and some necessary services will be running. The last step would be to run your ram wiper.