Fast-Booting OS for Usually-Off Appliance PCs? 523
An anonymous reader writes "I have some older computer equipment at work that I want to re-purpose as application appliances. The machines will sit, unpowered, until needed, then powered up. No way around the 'sitting powered off' — company directive. What is the quickest-booting OS I could use for them? I know about LinuxBIOS, but that would require new hardware, which does not go along which the re-purposing theme. Some of them do not need to be connected to a network, so an old version of Linux or Windows 98 are possible. DOS is too old to consider. So what are my options?"
Splashtop (Score:1, Informative)
http://www.splashtop.com/ [splashtop.com]
There you go.
Re:Splashtop (Score:4, Informative)
While that looks neat, there is no download for it.
"Splashtop is bundled with motherboards, desktops and notebooks by their manufacturers.
Currently, it is available with products from the following manufacturers:
Notebooks
ASUS
Motherboards
ASUS
Desktops"
So, unless you buy an ASUS machine, with this loaded, you look to be SOL.
Linux + hibernate (Score:5, Informative)
Windows 98 IS DOS (Score:2, Informative)
BeOS? (Score:5, Informative)
More realistically, there is this interesting Linux distribution, Webconverger:
http://webconverger.com/ [webconverger.com]
I've used it for a few web-only systems. Boots up fast enough. Use it as a starting point to tweak. Basically, firefox becomes your operating system and UI. Neat idea.
re (Score:5, Informative)
Fast boot (Score:4, Informative)
Not enough information (Score:5, Informative)
Just to be clear: You intend to have old machines sitting around unpowered and then someone WALKS UP TO THEM and presses the power button. The user then waits for the OS to boot and does his thing. Correct?v
So what are these systems being used for? Kiosks? This is critical to determining what you need. For example, QNX boots very quickly but it's an embedded Unix system. But QNX probably won't run whatever app it is you want to run on these systems.
Basically, you said they are going to be application appliances. WHAT application?
DSL and Puppy (Score:5, Informative)
Take a look at DSL and Puppy Linux. Both are tiny and would boot quickly from a CompactFlash. DSL is probably better for all-around appliance use; Puppy is intended for use as a desktop OS.
http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/ [damnsmalllinux.org]
http://www.puppylinux.org/ [puppylinux.org]
steveha
Re:More info is needed on what they need to do? (Score:4, Informative)
That's funny, because the latest version of DOS that I have is dated September 3, 2006 [ibiblio.org].
Is that too old now?
HIBERNATE (Score:4, Informative)
Any OS with hibernate should be quick enough. I doubt systems vary too much between them. Anything that uses minimal ram and hance has less to load on boot. Just go with whatever OS suits you best.
Panasonic HDTV use Linux (Score:1, Informative)
Some Panasonic Viera consumer HDTV sets run on a version of Linux. It takes 6 or 7 seconds to boot from ROM.
BeOS (Score:5, Informative)
BeOS really was pretty amazing in this respect, and some others. Multithreading was far ahead of anything else at the time, and probably since, as well. On some older machine (P3-ish; much slower HDD than nowadays) I clocked boot time at 15 seconds, OS/2 and Linux distros of the time were more like 1-1.5 minutes on the same hardware.
The way it booted so fast was largely by deferring a lot of the "initialization" stuff until the system was "booted". This is nothing like the awful way Windows (and to a lesser extent KDE/Gnome desktops) keep loading stuff for a good while, letting you see the desktop for a minute before you can really do anything. Under BeOS, said multithreading was well utilized to give you a responsive GUI right at that 15 seconds, but still do background loads of various background processes that you didn't *really* need immediately.
Of course, if you immediately launched something that *did* need the services of something loading in a background thread, you'd obviously have to wait a few more seconds. But even all that background loading was very efficient, and practically, by the time you could make a few clicks, it was loaded.
Re:re (Score:3, Informative)
Kids these days (Score:3, Informative)
You have a requirement for fast booting but you just blunder ahead and elimiate DOS from the running right from the start.
DOS can make a very capable platform if you don't need the support services of a more sophisticated OS. There is no question that it can be made to boot faster than most other off the shelf OS's. You don't mention what you need to run on these machines so it is hard to tell what will be suitable for you. You can run most *NIX shell apps under a DOS environment using DJGPP and its 32-bit extender. FreeDOS has a lot of drivers to handle more modern hardware. If you need something closer to a true *NIX system that boots fast, QNX is worth considering too.
Re:BeOS (Score:3, Informative)
M$ made OEM's not put BEOS on systems and that killed them.
Re:DSL and Puppy (Score:2, Informative)
I use DSL on an old Dell 400MHz Celeron L400c and it runs pretty quick. I'd say faster than Windows 98 did on that box. As far as boot up time, I really can't say since its been running for about 2 years now without a reboot ;) Its playing a list of mp3s in mp3blaster to provide music on hold for a PBX phone system. Every once in a while I ssh in and change the playlist. Good example of repurposed old hardware.
Re:Not enough information (Score:5, Informative)
I agree this is too little information, so I will take advantage of the vagueness to walk a decade down memory lane. :-)
Back in 1998 when I was first getting into Linux and other OSs--back when we thought OSs besides Windows had a chance because Windows was so crappy and all these others were so great--there were a couple experiments that were fun.
Re:Panasonic HDTV use Linux (Score:1, Informative)
Linux 2.6.11.12; http://www.am-linux.jp/dl/DTV07U [am-linux.jp]
Re:Splashtop (Score:3, Informative)
Splashtop requires a new motherboard. Motherboards aren't always expensive.
Since you need very specific ones they probably are and as someone else mentioned they won't work with older hardware. That's not counting whatever driver hell you may have with any peripherals.
And Splashtop is open source. If you go to their website and contact them, they will release source according to their site.
So you wouldn't even need a new motherboard then. Just install the Splashtop OS on your existing hardware.
Which will give you absolutely nothing, do you think it boots instantly by magic or something? Why in god's name do you think it requires specific motherboards or did you simply not think at all? Do you think that maybe those motherboard have some extra special hardware that let's splashtop do it's magic?
To quote wikipedia "Splashtop seems to work with a 512MB flash memory embedded on the PC motherboard.[6] A proprietary core engine starts at the BIOS boot and loads a specialized Linux distribution called a "Virtual Appliance Environment" (VAE). While running this VAE, the user can launch "Virtual Appliances" (VA). Skype is a VA, for instance.[7]"
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Zeta (OS) (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Splashtop (Score:1, Informative)
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Splashtop (Score:5, Informative)
Can you afford the extra electricity to power the old PC, and the extra air conditioning to get rid of the massive amounts of heat that old thing is going to put out?
The old things don't put off heat... Listen to yourself. I can't tell you how many Pentiums/K6/Cryix based systems I've seen with no fan but the one in the PSU. Oh and the PSU's, when's the last time you've opened an old computer and found anything higher then 250-300watts max? Can't say that I have, ever. In fact when I received 6 Pentium D's a few weeks ago from an office upgrading all there kit all they came equipped with mere 250w PSU, and those are somewhat modern systems based on an architecture that was known for reaching up to 115 W in 3.6-3.8 GHz Prescotts. So yeah I think your point is moot and your talking out your ass. But we'll never know :) He didn't specify the hardware.
Re:Splashtop (Score:4, Informative)
It is an optimized Linux stack. It should boot from a HDD. It doesn't "require" a specific motherboard, so much as ASUS is the only company to currently integrate it in their motherboards. The integrate it by storing the Splashtop software stack on a flash chip.
Re:how about Windows XP Embedded (Score:3, Informative)
Re:BeOS (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Splashtop (Score:3, Informative)
Along the lines of using a DSL like system though would be perhaps to use an older version of Debian, say Sarge or something.
Re:DSL and Puppy (Score:4, Informative)
I would suggest Slitaz [slitaz.org] myself. Hella useful, hella compact.
Re:BeOS (Score:3, Informative)
I was working on BeOS back then (video drivers, on contract to Be, Inc), and I have to say it depends on how you define "usable". Even when fully running it had no idea what a printer was, nor a network file system for that matter (not NFS, not SMB, nothing). The only way to transfer files was via FTP, and since BeOS had no real concept of users there was only one login/password for FTP access, with full read/write permission to everything.
The only thing in the whole system that had any concept of user was the filesystem, and that was all chown()ed to someone named Baron. Apparently as a birthday gift, if what I heard is to be believed.
The terminal was flaky (underscores left drool all over it), the editor was like a bastard combination of SimpleText and Win3.0 Notepad.exe with all the good stuff thrown away and all the annoying stuff amplified, and beyond those things, a movie player and a half-assed web browser there was nothing else.
Part of the reason it could boot so fast was that there wasn't a hell of a lot to boot.
Don't even get me started on the window manager. "Keyboard-based window switching is for wimps! Real men... uh... sort through giant piles of file manager windows looking for their buried app with the mouse." It's a bad sign when the internal developers are handing around an internal-use-only patch that makes the GUI usable. We had a developer come up, and the first thing he did was apply his pile of patches to give him alt-tab window switching and sliding titlebars and shut off the "open folder in new window in random screen location" nastiness and so forth, because he couldn't work with the OS as his company was planning to ship it. He couldn't give me an adequate answer when I asked why they didn't roll the patches into the OS.
I actually wound up doing all my BeOS coding on a AMD K5-based FreeBSD box and transferring it via FTP to the beefy P3 BeOS box, because you could actually DO something on the BSD box.
Depends on where your slowness is now (Score:4, Informative)
I have personally seen the kernel portion of a boot on an embedded board reduced to 186 milliseconds, using aggressive techniques such as Execute-in-Place.
For user space, customize your init scripts (actually, dump your init scripts in favor of one compiled /sbin/init binary).
In the x86 space, with legacy hardware, I think the thing that will give you the most problem is BIOS. I know of products with custom code that replaces BIOS, that load the kernel from ROM in under 150 milliseconds. But that's probably more effort than you are interested in. You may want to check out what options are available in your current (legacy) BIOS for skipping things like the POST test, etc.
Re:BeOS (Score:5, Informative)
we'll never know what could have been.
Maybe we will - http://www.haiku-os.org/ [haiku-os.org]
Re:Linux + hibernate (Score:2, Informative)
If Linux specifically mentioned in the summary, why would you even consider Windows?
Its obvious that Linux will run the application in question.
And it seems like they should 'just work' and be low maintenance.
Also fast booting was a requirement. That rules Windows out. ;)
Re:Linux + hibernate (Score:4, Informative)
OpenWRT? (Score:2, Informative)
Then of course there always LFS, DSL, various Slack distros, etc. but you still get limited by the bios.
You may want to check over on the mp3car.com forums. I've seen a couple threads over there on getting machines to boot up quick, though I couldn't comment on the quality of the content.
Parent is correct. (Score:4, Informative)
Why do good posts like this so often get modded badly, while FALSE posts like those contradicting it get modded insightful.
Read:
"Splashtop is preinstalled on the hard drive or in the on-board Flash memory of new PCs and motherboards by their manufacturers. Splashtop is a software-only solution that requires no additional hardware. A small component of Splashtop is embedded in the BIOS of the PC - that's the part that runs as soon as you press the power button."
This should make it obvious, along with the couple intelligent posters who noted that it can boot from an HD.
Maybe Slashdot needs to start restricting mod points to those who aren't idiots?
Re:Depends on where your slowness is now (Score:3, Informative)
Right. I just measured this on my PC with Debian Etch:
It's not hard to get those 14s down to something insignificant. Who wouldn't mind a 5s delay here, after waiting 30s for BIOS? I don't think one has to hack the whole init sequence into pieces: begin by not starting a lot of servers, check the contents of /etc/rc?.d, and measure the results.
Re:re (Score:1, Informative)
They're more of a pain to install, but if you want fast booting and something that's usable on a PII 300 or similar machine, both OpenBSD and FreeBSD fly through booting, and running a lightweight window manager is at least perfectly capable of browsing the web, and playing movies with VLC. Haven't tried OpenOffice.org
Eh? (Score:4, Informative)
Windows 98 is okay but DOS is too old? Eh?
First, we have NO idea what you actually want. Are these going to be running dumb terminals, displays, "embedded device" roles, what? What sort of machines are we talking about? What sort of budget do you consider acceptable?
Seriously, if you want things to boot THAT quick, you're either going to have to spend money (LinuxBIOS, replacing with ARM or other embedded devices etc.) or you're going to have to compromise (DOS or some other really-cut-down OS). FreeDOS is used in these sorts of things all the time, even for networking appliances with appropriate drivers loaded. People have FreeDOS MP3 players in place of their CD-players in their car. Virtually-instant to boot.
Back in the day, you could get an old DOS machine to boot really quickly if you optimised everything and cut out all the cruft (BIOS boot times were actually a large part of it, unfortunately, what with memory-checks, floppy-checks etc.) . Guess what, you won't get that same machine to boot any quicker today without replacing parts.
If you have minimal actual software requirements (i.e. they ain't doing anything fancy and need to boot REALLY fast), then you're looking at DOS. Otherwise you're looking at Linux (if you want to keep licensing, support, compatibility costs down) unless you want to buy XP licenses for them all. Wouldn't like to think what Windows 98 would work like in this on/off scenario. I suspect that it would start crashing out, hitting filesystem checks, etc. eventually no matter what you tried. And Windows 98 is SLOW to boot. Incredibly so. For a start, it loads DOS first and then kicks itself in after that!
After you've sorted the OS, if you're still struggling then you can look at things like LinuxBIOS (sorry, but that's the only way you'll speed up the BIOS boot times on older PC's but the chances are that it's just not supported for your chipset).
To be honest, from a power-saving perspective, just bin the lot (see if you can get a few quid for them first) and then buy some Gumstix or similar embedded board, Mini-ITX etc. You can literally leave something like that on 24/7 and not pull anywhere near the power you would draw with an old PC in one hour. And you can have them boot extremely fast and minimally.
Re-using old hardware is great. Expecting it to perform brilliantly isn't. Booting reliably into a powerful, full-featured OS in a handful of seconds *is* performing brilliantly. We couldn't do it back in the days of DOS devices with standard PC's, you aren't going to manage it now without making some cutbacks on your expectations. And then for about £50 each, you can get tiny, powerful, power-saving, fan-free, embedded ARM units with Linux that'll do anything you want.
You have unrealistic expectations.
Re:Parent is correct. (Score:4, Informative)
Since you can't GET Splashtop without buying the new hardware, that kinda kills it.
Minix 3 (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Splashtop (Score:4, Informative)
The problem there is that you don't recompile DSL (and I'm sure Puppy either since, iirc, it was initially based on DSL).
I'm guessing he meant recompile the kernel to match the specific hardware. There's no point waiting for the kernel to scan for every SCSI device ever made if you don't have any. Also you can build a non-modular kernel and avoid the need to run module update scripts and eliminate the initrd. You can generally save several seconds this way if you really know what you're doing.
Re:Splashtop (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Well, (Score:3, Informative)
Try AmigaOS loading from a proper hard drive instead of floppy, it takes longer to spin up the drive than it does to boot to workbench. I could get my A4000 to boot in 5 seconds from pressing the power switch.
I wonder what one of those solid state drives would do for it... I have a 32Mb solid state IDE drive somewhere, thats big enough for AmigaOS...
Re:power usage. (Score:3, Informative)
This is hard to find information. In most test pc are rated under load.
but Here [findarticles.com]
. I was shocked to discover just what an inefficient beast the desktop is: even when the computer and monitor are physically turned off, they continue to draw 31 watts from the wall (precisely what the laptop consumes when it is on and in use).
I was sure i read such values from a test on tomshardware, but i fail to locate it now.
Re:Splashtop (Score:5, Informative)
I disagree.. he wants a complete OS/environment.
http://www.qnx.com/ [qnx.com]
you can get it's complete kit free nfor non commercial use. is INSANE FAST at booting if you do it right and is small.
Re:BeOS (Score:4, Informative)
To add some detail, Microsoft's Windows license to PC manufacturers gave them highly preferential pricing if they agreed to pay for a Windows license on every PC shipped, and to not shipping any other OS with their PC's, with the difference in price so high that no OEM could possibly agree to pay the higher price. The restriction was quite extreme - Microsoft blocked several companies from even shipping a BeOS CD in the same box as a "BeOS PC" - I think Fujitsu actually shipped PC's for a little while with no OS, and a form that you could fill out and send them so that they would FedEx you a copy of BeOS. Of course, since they had to pay for Windows anyway, the BeOS PC was not only more complex (you had to order the install CD, then do the OS install) but cost more (since you had to pay for both Windows and BeOS).
By the time the DoJ settlement clarified that this restriction was illegal, BeOS was long dead.
I miss BeOS. On a ThinkPad, BeOS would boot and be running so quickly that if I powered on as I took it from my laptop bag it was ready by the time I put my laptop down and opened the screen. Much faster than Windows coming back from hibernation.
Of course, the old install CD's still work, so if you just need a fast booting OS with a web browser, email, etc., you could probably still run it.
Re:Splashtop (Score:5, Informative)
All well and good he wants to "save money" and re-use existing hardware, but changing an OS is going to mean a LOT of time, testing, and likely new software. The cost of this will FAR out shadow the costs of a new piece of compatible hardware...
Of course, before you can ask what OS to run, we might want to know what applications it's being used for... and why exactly would an application appliance be powered off? this obviously isn't a database that gets regular attention, or any kind of security device, backup system, or other management system. so...
I'm assuming we're talking about legacy apps here then. In that case, I'm CERTAIN you have idle space and CPU time on existing servers. Throw a VM in there, and use that. When idle (hibernate, wake on LAN) it should use no more energy that the host would be when idle by itself, and if that host is a machine that DOES have to be on 24/7, then you're effectively using 0 additional power. It will wake on LAN in 15-30 seconds, maybe faster, and can auto hibernate again when idle. Simple, clean, and as a bonus, you can move the old hardware to your DR or testing lab.
*listens to all the *NIX distros* (Score:3, Informative)
*Points to MenuetOS.*
you can boot the entire OS direct from floppy. Programmed in x86/x64 assembler (Yea there are 32 and 64 bit versions) and it will fit your purpose for non-networked machines (getting the network to work requires a little assembler knowledge)
It also boots faster than anything else I've ever seen, next to a NES game.
Re:Splashtop (Score:3, Informative)
Puppy's not based on DSL now and I don't think it ever was. Puppy is specifically designed to run well on old hardware. You could go on about various linux flavors, compiling & optimizing, but if the original poster wants something that works out of the box with minimal fuss, puppy ought to work just fine, as should DSL.
Dunno about using a hibernate in puppy since it's been a while since I last played with it, but the boot times ought to be great if you can do it - they're great on a straight boot from the HDD.