Fast-Booting OS for Usually-Off Appliance PCs?

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?"

Well,

[SuiteSisterMary]

There's always BeOS, which prided itself on lightning-fast load times. Otherwise, a rather stripped down UNIX-alike would do you fine.

More info is needed on what they need to do?

[Joe The Dragon]

Dos may work well as well as windows 3.11 or windows 98.

A CF based disk will boot fast as well as a ssd.

how about Windows XP Embedded

[Anonymous Coward]

why not use Windows XP Embedded its not that hard to install it supports older hardware... and it isnt resource intensive if setup correctly

OpenBSD?

[condition-label-red]

Depending on the intended use, a minimal install of OpenBSD [openbsd.org] might do the trick.

Re:What will they be used for?

[Iamthecheese]

And will they be totally unnetworked? And do they have infared ports? because if they do, they really are networked for security purposes.

MenuetOS

[Vectronic]

MenuetOS [menuetos.net] Its a bit hardcore though, and you would probably have a hard time getting 'normal' applications to work, but its tiny and quick, although sort of a beta still.

But if you know ASM, its could be a miracle cure or something...

MenuetOS is an Operating System in development for the PC written entirely in 32/64 bit assembly language, and released under the License. It supports 32/64 bit x86 assembly programming for smaller, faster and less resource hungry applications.

Menuet has no roots within UNIX or the POSIX standards, nor is it based on any operating system. The design goal has been to remove the extra layers between different parts of an OS, which normally complicate programming and create bugs.

Menuet's application structure is not specifically reserved for asm programming since the header can be produced with practically any other language. However, the overall application programming design is intended for easy 32/64 bit asm programming. Menuet's responsive GUI is easy to handle with assembly language.

Features:

- Pre-emptive multitasking with 1000hz scheduler, multithreading, ring-3 protection
- Responsive GUI with resolutions up to 1280x1024, 16 million colours
- Free-form, transparent and skinnable application windows, drag'n drop
- IDE: Editor/Assembler for applications
- USB 2.0 Hi-speed storage support
- TCP/IP stack with Loopback & Ethernet drivers
- Email/ftp/http/chess clients and ftp/mp3/http servers
- Hard real-time data fetch
- Fits on a single floppy

Happens to be a favorite of mine (not mine as in created), although probably not suited to your needs judging by the brief summary.

Re:Linux + hibernate

[Locklin]

Suspend to disk can be really fast if there is very little running. The more running, the more has to be swapped out to disk, then reloaded from disk at boot.

Re:re

[TheRealMindChild]

Ok. I HAVE to bite this one in the butt. After trying ALL of the recent "light weight" distros on my fathers Pentium II 300 w/256 MB of ram, DSL, Xubuntu, etc ALL FAILED miserably on it. 5 minute boot times, sluggish response, you name it. It wasn't usable. Oddly enough, I threw Slackware 4.0 on it and it ran great, while Slackware 12 did not. Maybe it is the 2.6 kernel... I haven't a clue. But there isn't an up to date distro that will run sufficiently as a desktop on such hardware. Period.

Re:BeOS

[Lord Kano]

I remember when one of the Mac magazines gave away a BeOS preview release. I installed it on my 6400/200. I was able to play 8 quicktime movies all at the same time with no noticeable performace hit. I was really stoked about the possibilities. Unfortunately, Apple didn't go with Be and we'll never know what could have been.

LK

Netboot Thin-Client

[Anonymous Coward]

PXELinux and some kind of thin-client? If it's Windows either Terminal Services or Citrix. I'm not sure of the Linux equivalent(VNC, NetworkX?).

I did a setup at my school with 200 old machines and Windows 2003 on the server-side, and it worked very well for our needs.

http://thinstation.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/ThIndex

Re:Well,

[gooman]

BeOS was as close to "instant on" as I've ever seen in an OS. Everyone who saw it was amazed. My computer took longer to go through the BIOS screens than BeOS took to load. Once the splashscreen appeared it was at the desktop in 5 seconds. I wonder how well Haiku performs in this regard.

Re:Splashtop

[Enderandrew]

It is an optimized Linux stack according to the site and developers section. It should install on a HDD in theory.

Re:More info is needed on what they need to do?

[vtcodger]

***As stated in the original paragraph, "DOS is too old to consider"***

That's silly. If MSDOS/Freedos will do the job, why the hell would it be too old to consider? It's far more stable than later MS OSes and will boot nearly instantaneously. Moreover, it is the only PC OS that is almost simple enough to understand. A fair variety of software is available that will run under MSDOS with a DOS extender to provide access to memory above 1MB.

Next choice would be Windows 95 with all two dozen service packs. Or OSR2. It will boot faster than Windows 98 (Less crap) and will support a suprising amount of Windows software. I'm not entirely sure why, but enabling MSDOS disk caching will speed up Windows 95 boot by 10% or so.

It may be necessary to spend time tuning the BIOS, and maybe even reconfiguring IDE hard drives and CDROM drives. Some older BIOSes can take a loooooooong time -- like 30 seconds plus -- dealing with pathological IDE configurations.

Or Linux. I don't know if Slackware still has SlackZIP, but it's specifically intended to boot from MSDOS/Windows 9 environments -- which means that you can set it up to run as desired while still having a functioning OS, then replace the bootloader to boot directly to Linux.

One caution. Unless the operation has a generous people budget and no hardware budget or is going to deploy dozens of identical boxes, it is almost always going to be more cost effective to buy a prebuilt appliance than to roll your own.

Re:re

[Anonymous Coward]

DeLiLinux is catering to old hardware.
2.4, etc.

Check it out, it may work for you:
http://www.delilinux.org/ [delilinux.org]

Re:Why is fast booting important?

[Anonymous Coward]

And what magic thing is the computer doing during those 90 seconds that makes it "stable and reliable"? Sorry but I don't buy it. 90 seconds extra can only bring you extra bloat. Besides, the boot time constraint *is* the question. If you remove it then the question disappears, so play along, and shut up if you don't have an answer.

application appliances?

[1u3hr]

How the hell can anyone make a sensible suggestion when we have no idea what the hardware is or what the applications are they're supposed to run?

Windows 2000 hibernate?

[dreemernj]

A trimmed down Win2K that's hibernated can be surprisingly fast. In college I relied on a Pentium 200 with 32MB RAM and a 2 gig harddrive for my in class note taking and presentations, usually using Office 2000.

On a system with that little ram the default install will use very little memory from a fresh boot and a lot of stuff can still be turned off to get it smaller.

I kind of relied on it shutting down and starting up fast for back to back classes. The laptop was already old and didn't have a working battery so it was a full power down every class. $1200 a semester in books FTL.

Re:Splashtop

[markov_chain]

Dude I've had it to here with old PCs as appliances. 250W PSU? Are you kidding me? Have you seen how much power a newish VIA mini-ITX board draws? Hint: it's in low single digits.

Re:Well,

[Hal_Porter]

What about Windows XP? I used to run it on a 6 year old Fujitsu ultraportable (1Ghz P3, 384M of Ram). Or a 10 year old Celeron 300A with 512MB. It was pretty snappy on those. It would boot to the GUI in ~30 seconds on both.

Re:Splashtop

[spankymm]

Can *we* afford the environmental cost of replacing a working system?

VMWARE

[tsalmark]

Going with the assumption that you will have at least one of these, normally off, appliances on often enough to justify it: One fast computer with a large and fast hard-drive holding a number of these normally off images. All sorts of benefits - Images can be archived and moved to another computer if hardware starts to go. Numerous images can be maintained easily, and remotely. If one appliance becomes popular, it can be put on a dedicated machine easily. Then if thats not fast enough, any *NIX that does not load unneeded daemons, especially a GUI. Slackware tends to boot very fast for me

Re:ROM based OS's?

[Silicon Jedi]

Like this sort of thing?
http://www.atarimagazines.com/compute/issue153/105_Paradise_Accelerator.php [atarimagazines.com]
It's a card that does a hardware bitblt operation so the CPU doesn't.
Windows accelerators are 2-D graphics accelerators.

Re:BeOS

[Arbitrarystring]

I loved BeOS. At the time I used it (for about a year or so) it was the fastest, frankly most awesome OS I had ever used. I switched to Linux later, but I really wish BeOS development had continued in the way Linux has done.

Re:What will they be used for?

[snowraver1]

How is this offtopic? Many older computer do have infrared ports, in hope that it would actually catch on one day.

Re:Splashtop

[Homer's Donuts]

confession:

I have a IBM PC with a flip top case.

It is just too cool to get rid of.

Re:BeOS

[Ucklak]

I believe that Microsoft told OEM partners that if they offered BeOS as an alternative, they would lose the ability to sell Microsoft's OSs.
That's what happened.

Re:Linux + hibernate

[AJWM]

With Linux you won't have to look for drivers, they'll be built in. Linux has phenomenal support for hardware, that tends to get better as the hardware ages -- Linux developers have incentive to keep supporting it, unlike the hardware vendors. (Barring really crippled stuff like winmodems, but even those have some support).

Depending on the age/capability of the hardware you might need to go with an older version of a distro or just omit a bunch of default crap on the install. I've got some old Pentium boxen that run fine but modern distros gripe about not having enough RAM to run the graphic installer. Boots fast, though, unless it decides that two years since the last fsck is too long and forces it (override with tunefs).

Re:Who needs an os?

[mrchaotica]

Intel wanted to create their own new thing so that they could build in DRM and Treacherous Computing.

Here's an adventurous project: MenuetOS

[Unconventional]

http://www.menuetos.net/ [menuetos.net] Please check out the MenuetOS page, download a disk image, and see if it's something you can use. Can't hurt to try it on one of the old machines. The hardware requirements are modest for the 32-bit version, plus it's Open Source.

Re:Linux + hibernate

[AJWM]

I have old Dells, old Gateways, old IBM's, old Compaqs and HPs. Never had a problem with built-in video. Only had one problem with built-in sound that was quickly solved by looking at the configuration (non-standard) in Windows 98. Never a problem with built in CD drives or CD or DVD drives I bought from a store. (The only exception was an Acer CD drive somebody gave me -- didn't work worth a damn, I never bothered trying it in Windows.) I've used all kinds of SCSI, Firewire, USB and serial gizmos, and parallel printers, without a problem. Perhaps I was just never stupid enough to buy old parallel non-printer peripherals. There have been a few odd-ball USB gizmos -- a cheapo (giveaway) digital camera, for example -- that didn't work on Linux, but those had a hard time working on Windows, even assuming you could find the driver disk that originally came with it or find somewhere on the net to download a driver.

Now, the old Dells, HPs, etc have been retired office machines, not consumer boxes. In my experience the manufacturers tend to cut more corners in the consumer stuff (the margins are thin as it is) and so may be more likely to use oddball parts or configurations that are less well supported. If the repurposed machines the OP was talking about were business machines (even desktops), they're more likely to "just work" with a Linux distro. In the OP's particular case, I'd say try both and go with what works best on those particular systems.

Get a ***ing Commodore

[Anonymous Coward]

Think about it: If it is really about the boot time, nothing beats the old homecomputers like the c64.

I think it is all about your appliance. Is your appliance a web page - maybe you want QNC. If you want a calculator: Don't use i386 in the first place!

Puppy Linux

[kamikaez]

One of the fastest and smallest linux distroes around that also include every thing you want. Recently the main developer have focused a lot on boot time, releasing a special build for those that want fast boot (UniPup).

Read more about it in his blog(linkin to google cache since I don't think his blog can take a slashdot): http://google.com/search?q=cache:3oVbzBTFnpIJ:www.puppylinux.com/blog/+puppy+linux+blog&hl=no&ct=clnk&cd=2&gl=no&client=firefox-a [google.com]

The blog post on UniPup: http://google.com/search?q=cache:cC9Ah83omzkJ:www.puppylinux.com/blog/%3FviewDetailed%3D00194+puppy+linux+UniPup+blog&hl=no&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=no&client=firefox-a [google.com]

Puppy home page: http://www.puppylinux.org/ [puppylinux.org]

Re:BeOS

[aproposofwhat]

Awesome!

Just downloaded the VMWare image, and it booted to a usable state in < 20 seconds. That compares with around 90 seconds for a Knoppix ISO image to boot from the same VMWare console.

When there are some apps for Haiku, I'll definitely be installing it on my home machine as an alternative and something to play with.

Re:power usage.

[Lost Race]

I've never seen a PC draw more than 5W in S4 or S5. Come to think of it, I've never even seen more than 5W in S3. And I've got some crappy cheap inefficient PSUs here. 10W would have to include a monitor in standby. 75W? that's just unbelievable.

Re:re

[schlouse]

I do the same thing that you do even though I can get new hardware easily. It's just in my nature, I guess. Do more with less.

Here's what I do:

• Pull it all apart and clean it with a compressed air canister. Clean the case with hot water and a sponge.
• Take note of the exact specs of the machine. Locate the motherboard manual. Skim it.
• Note the BIOS version. Look at every single BIOS setting. Usually there's something wrong. Make the appropriate changes. If there are any BIOS updates available, apply them.
• Go to crucial.com and try to locate the system in their database. Note the system's maximum RAM amount as well as the type of RAM used. Very this against the motherboard manual.
• Get on EBay. Bid on the cheapest setup that will max out the motherboard's RAM. Just pay for it yourself. If you quit your job, take both the PC (it was going to be thrown out, remember? You saved it and by law it's now yours) and the memory.
• Put a decent HD or two in it. Any setup totaling 100GB or so makes a nice little server for something. If it's a relatively recent machine, stick a PCI SATA card in it and some cheap SATA drives from Ebay (I saw a 120GB SATA drive for $20 a couple days ago).
• Put DSL with the 2.4 kernel or any of the BSDs on it. I put NetBSD on a P3 laptop maxed out with a GB of RAM and it absolutely screamed. If it's a decent box, throw an extra NIC in it. Put OpenBSD on it and make it your head-end router/firewall for the rest of the frankenboxen.

Re:Well,

[Muad'Dave]

My TRS-80 booted up* before the image on the CRT stopped wiggling around! Talk about instant.

*Disclaimer for you 'yutes' out there: the TRS-80 I had ran a Basic interpreter directly from a ROM or PROM. IIRC, it had a 2 MHz Z-80 CPU, 16K of RAM, and used a cassette recorder as its sole storage medium. Smokin'!

I did buy a Stringy Floppy [wikipedia.org] for it, and that thing was fast and had infinite storage capacity as far as I was concerned.

Re:BeOS

[tha_mink]

BeOS was dying at that time. All Microsoft's pressure did was put a stake in its heart.

You're wrong. BeOS was thriving at the time. In fact, when the bootloader thing became public, Compaq had made an agreement with BeOS to install BeOS on every machine they made along with windows. They were going to dual boot through the Beos bootloader, until microsoft brought to their (compaq's) attention that their agreement said that if Windows was installed, it HAD to be loaded with the MS bootloader, which couldn't boot any non-ms product. That's how they got hosed. They weren't dying, they were thriving. That pretty much stopped the train.