Fast-Booting Text-Editor Operating System?

cgenman writes "What is the fastest booting operating system out there that is still sufficient for editing text? Quite frequently, I'll need to boot my laptop and edit a few lines of text, or jot down an idea or two. XP loads in roughly 4 minutes to usable, and Ubuntu loads in about 60 seconds. Both feel like an eternity if there isn't a pen and paper around. What is the best operating system that people have found which would load to useable in under 20 seconds, can edit text files in something a little more friendly than VI or EMACS, yet can still access fat32 formatted USB drives? GUIs aren't required, but commands which require arcane foreknowledge or a cheat sheet are out."

Not hard

You could go with a straight BusyBox [busybox.net], or add a slightly more robust text editor to the enviornment.
Then compile that into your initramfs, and just don't bother to do a switch_root to a real file system. As long as you've got the hardware and filesystem drivers compiled into the kernel, life is good.
See http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/ [linuxfromscratch.org] for more details.
This use-case is one where I would not recommend emacs.

Re:Not hard

add a slightly more robust text editor

I would recommend Nano http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nano_(text_editor) [wikipedia.org] for this purpose. It's easier to use than vim or emacs, and more familiar if you have a MS-DOS 'Edit' background. If you don't need to do any heavy duty coding, Nano is more than powerful enough.

Wake up

My laptop never shuts down, I always just put it to sleep. Flip open, hack away. Less than 5 seconds. Oh, that's under Ubuntu, by the way.

Re:Wake up

LinuxBIOS/Coreboot will get a system up in 3 seconds or less. Add in a busybox/light distro, and you've usable editors, network tools, utilities and the BSD games available about as fast as you'll get. Well, if you replace the flash with a large enough PROM, you might shave a little more time, as a permanent gate should be faster than a programmable gate.

Re:Wake up

$> man hibernate.conf

PowerdownMethod (requires UseSuspend2 on)

Allows you to choose what Software Suspend 2 should do after writing its image to disk. 3/4/5 will only work if you have ACPI enabled in your kernel. 3/4/5 correspond to the ACPI states S3 (suspend-to-RAM), S4 (suspend-to-disk), and S5 (power off). Choosing 3 will request your machine to enter the S3 Suspend-to-RAM state if it is supported - this allows you drastically cut the resume time waiting for your BIOS but still consumes power whilst hibernated (though the image is not lost should power run out). Choosing 4 will cause your machine to enter an S4 sleep state which may also reduce the resume time without using any power whilst hibernated. Choose ing 5 will cause your machine to switch off after suspending (traditional method) but might still cause your machine to resume when you open the lid. 0 bypasses ACPI and shuts off the machine completely.

Another words there is a another option that gives you instant on and protects against dead batteries on Linux. Apple computers do a version of this by default.

Re:Wake up

Continuing your analogy and at the risk of starting an argument; It's more like he's asking for advice on increasing the performance of his car because he wants to get A to B in under 2 hours. If someone were to point out that the train only takes 1 hour, it would be a point worthy of consideration.

Suspend to disk?

Most modern O/S support suspend to disk [wikipedia.org] which can give you a usable desktop in under 20s. Per your example both XP and Ubuntu can do it in that time. And that's ignoring the even faster suspend to ram which almost all laptops feature these days (granted that for that there is a power requirement).

It's not in the 'spirit' of your question, but perhaps it's a better solution to your problem?

DOS

How about DOS?

Re:DOS

OK, in restrospect that's funny, but I was being serious. FreeDOS meets all his requirements. It boots to command line in just a few seconds, supports FAT32, is easy to use, and there are countless thousands of high quality text editors of all flavors available for it. It even has TCP/IP support and such, and it can be booted off the oldest, smallest, most worthless thumb drive that you possibly own.

Re:DOS

Maybe you meant that as a joke, but you're not far off:

Kolibrios is a full, modern OS with a desktop. Written in Assembly, which as you can imagine makes in unbelievably fast. Can boot from a floppy.

I just tried it out a few days ago

http://www.kolibrios.org/ [kolibrios.org]

Re:DOS

DOS will not have any of the power management features required to operate a modern laptop. The hit to your battery life would be SEVERE

pico

boot a GUI-less linux install and use pico/nano for text editing.

all the key commands are shown at the bottom of the screen.

I recommend

Windows Vista Ultimate. Just get a sharpie and write on the screen.

Freedos?

So, you want fast booting?

Get FreeDOS [freedos.org] and one of the text editors from here [freedos.org].

I can't think of anything that will boot faster, although EMACS will likely be the friendliest editor available.

Re:Freedos?

"Eeepc 2G Surf cold boot to X in 10 sec" (the video is quite impressive, even you see the results in the title):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SzkQhHaFE0I [youtube.com]

Some more details:
http://forum.eeeuser.com/viewtopic.php?id=25964 [eeeuser.com]

I have no doubt that FreeDOS can do better than that, but I'm actually curious how fast is it? And is the speed so much better that it is better than 10 seconds with a GUI.

Probably one from Stalman

"What is the fastest booting operating system out there that is still sufficient for editing text?

I'd say Stallman's first OS:

doofus@hotdog:~$ time emacs -nw

real 0m2.075s
user 0m0.372s
sys 0m0.076s
doofus@hotdog:~$

Smartphone?

Aren't you more likely to have your cellphone in your pocket than be lugging around a laptop? I just jot notes on my iPhone.

Hibernate. Or get a phone with a notes function.

Hibernate. My laptop boots in about 20-30 seconds, with windows XP. I hear Ubuntu boots faster out of hibernation.

Or you could get a cell phone with a note-taking function. My work-provided Palm Treo does this, Blackberrys do, iPhones... Hell, even phones without a full keyboard typically have a notes application these days, and you can type fairly fast with T9-word.

Just suspend

I think you're asking the wrong question here. Any decent laptop with Linux or XP or OSX should be able to go into suspend mode and resume in about 2-8 seconds. I think my laptop hasn't been 'rebooted' in about two months, I just leave it constantly in suspend mode and activate it for 5-30 minutes at a time.

Even if you get a near instant booting OS just the Power on Self Test is going to take longer than resuming from a suspend.

Just to jot things down?

Call me a Luddite, but I carry a small, pocket sized Mead pad around and a small pen.

Behold: http://www.mead.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/product3_10051_10006_126671_-1_false_10051 [mead.com]

And you can get it in a different color each time! :)

The MIT Lisp Machine's "instaboot" feature

I think the people saying to use hibernation/sleep features are probably closest to right for most practical purposes now. I thought I'd add a historical side-note...

In the 1980's, MIT Lisp Machines were often used in demos for visitors from funding agencies. Probably mostly people from (D)ARPA. And things would often go wrong. Things had to reboot.

Now instruction times were a lot slower then, but you'd be surprised how little boot times have changed over the years. Seems like every time someone speeds up the hardware, they also slow down the speed of booting of both at least the operating system and maybe also the programs. So normal booting was a process of 30 seconds or a minute, as I recall. And that was inconvenient for these demos.

So someone worked out a way that you could do something called instaboot. You'd load up everything you needed and would save the image, kind of like going into standby mode on your computer. But it was intended to be restarted multiple times. When you started, it would just pull in the pages that you needed first to let you run, pulling in other things you needed on demand.

You could save it in whatever state you wanted, for example with the editor already loaded and started. Even with files loaded ito editor buffers if you wanted, though that obviously ran the risk that if you later edited them on two subsequent occasions, you might get a conflict. But that was up to you. Nothing kept you from trying.

The effect was startling. You could reboot the machine and be up and running in about a second, maybe two. The only evidence was that the screen would change and would kind of bounce (some sort of sync pulse or degaussing thing or something, I never quite knew what that was).

So demos were always loaded and saved, then booted into. When the demo went bad, you just hit reboot. It was so fast, people would notice something had happened but often wouldn't know what. "Just garbage collecting," we would say. Well, it was sort of true. Rebooting is a particularly efficient way to garbage collect.

For some reason, that feature was not carried forward into later models of the Lisp Machine. It was only there on the CADR at MIT (and perhaps the LM-2 and the TI Explorer and LMI Lambda, I'm not sure, since I never used those, though they were repackaged variants of the same thing). It didn't go into the Symbolics 3600 nor later series machines.

A blast from the past

No USB drive compatibility, but instant on.

The love of newspaper field reporters for decades:

http://oldcomputers.net/trs100.html [oldcomputers.net]

Not bad for 1983.

You must be doing something wrong.

XP loads in roughly 4 minutes to usable

Well, mine boots in one minute, and that's including the 25 seconds the RAID controller spends looking for drives (before I installed it, it "booted to desktop" in exactly 26 seconds - I timed it). Add about 3 seconds to start something like Notepad / Textpad (or 6 seconds to start a real word processor) and you should be up and running in 30-90 seconds. Not lightning fast, and slightly slower than a "lightweight" Linux system, but a long way from "4 minutes".

But you can be up and running in much less than that simply by using sleep / hibernate, instead of actually loading the full OS.

Or get a modern PDA / cell phone. You can take photos of anything that's already written down or you can use the sound recorder to take voice notes (this is assuming you don't like typing on a PDA / cell phone keyboard). Then just transfer everything to your PC via Wi-Fi or Bluetooth or whatever.

For the true "pen & paper" feel, get a digital pen [destinyplc.co.uk] (Flash-heavy site). You'll still need to find something (or someone) to write on, though.

Re:Hibernate mode

I recommend a solution of hydrocyanic acid.

Next question.

Re:Heh - I thought TFA was going to be a faster em

"Me, I just write shit on my hand with a sharpie."

I do the same, just on my forehead.

It has obviously made me more efficient, as requests for my IT assistance has dropped markedly.