Fast-Booting Text-Editor Operating System? 660
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."
toms root (Score:4, Interesting)
tomsroot http://www.toms.net/rb/ [toms.net]
DOS. (Score:4, Interesting)
If that's not fast enough for you, a TRS-80 Model 100 might do. They boot nearly instantly and have a built-in text editor. (The 32K max memory capacity might be a bit limiting, though.)
Smartphone? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:DOS (Score:3, Interesting)
Except that you're likely to hate the filesystem choices available.
Arch Linux (Score:3, Interesting)
I dabbled in Arch Linux a bit a while back. I was booting it off of a USB flash drive (one of the slow cheap ones, not one of the fast new ones) and I am pretty sure it booted in less than 20 seconds. Of course, I had to patch their bootup scripts myself to have it boot that fast, because they had some dumb logic that was waiting a fixed period of time for detected usb devices to show up, rather than polling and exiting the wait loop when the devices were there. So whereas it would always take 10 or 15 seconds (whatever you had configured it to) with their scripts, my change allowed my system to usually wait only a few seconds. Net result, the thing booted pretty quickly. Of course, I submitted a patch to them, and they have done nothing with it, or the bug I opened for the issue, so that put me off Arch Linux pretty quick.
Anyway, there were alot of nice things about Arch Linux; it is vastly streamlined compared to normal Linux. And if you know what you are doing, you can definitely get it under the 20 second boot time with just a little tweaking. Then you have a full-fledged Linux system to work on instead of some hacked together boot/root disks or whatever.
ARM Linux board (Score:4, Interesting)
Heh - I thought TFA was going to be a faster emacs (Score:4, Interesting)
That said, if i really cared to have a text-editor-capable OS boot quickly, _and_ it needed FAT32.
Hmm.
Is VFAT close enough for ya? Win98 boot disk transmuted onto a USB dongle with the VFAT driver in the config.sys. Boot only to command.com, not the full OS.
It'll probably take longer for your box to POST than to boot that puppy.
Me, I just write shit on my hand with a sharpie.
Use a DS? (Score:4, Interesting)
Resume on a DS is practically instantaneous, at least for commercial titles, and there's a lively homebrew scene, maybe there's already something out there that might work out for you? Plus very portable and easy to scribble with the touchscreen, and great battery life.
Oh, and games too :)
MenuetOS (Score:4, Interesting)
www.menuetos.org
Both 64 and 32 bit versions.
I think you'll find that boots *Very* fast.
Re:DOS (Score:3, Interesting)
Our reflectometer works with a DOS PC (Score:4, Interesting)
Last Friday I was using our reflectometer [wikipedia.org] and was impressed by the fact that the PC that controls it boots in about 6 seconds directly into the application! It's based on DOS and the PC is a .... 33MHz Intel 386! It would be cool if a contemporary PC based on a 3GHz CPU could boot into such an application in 0.06 seconds. I know, I/O is the main bottleneck, I guess, though hard disks have indeed gotten about 100 times faster in data transfer, and about 5 times faster in seek time, since the 386 was the hotness.
Re:Wake up (Score:1, Interesting)
Hibernate is not always a practical solution.
For instance, I have an eee PC, with 2GB ram, and 4GB internal flash drive.
To be able to hibernate, I'd have to have a 2GB swap file, which would mean not using over half of the flash drive.
If Linux could reliably identify the external USB flash drives and the card reader always with the same mount point, this would not be a problem. As I could put the swap file on them. But Linux can't do that.
Try Syllable (Score:3, Interesting)
Hi,
My name is Rick Caudill and I work on the Syllable project. I would say you should give Syllable(www.syllable.org) a try. My machine boots to a gui within 10 seconds. Just give it a try
Re:Wake up (Score:5, Interesting)
EPOC (Score:3, Interesting)
Tandy 102 (Score:1, Interesting)
Instant-on, portable, full keyboard, and uses 4 AA batteries. No need to wait 20 seconds... sheesh.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80_Model_100_line [wikipedia.org]
This chap has how to hitch it up to Linux or Xbox and whatnot.
http://www.planetnz.com/palmheads/tandy.php [planetnz.com]
Re:Wake up (Score:3, Interesting)
Not true.
It might not do it nicely for you by default, but you can configure udev rules to guarantee the mount points correctly.
why not single-user mode? (Score:1, Interesting)
Well if you have Ubuntu installed and you just need to edit a txt file then have a grub entry that goes to single user mode, it will just boot the kernel and giv you a bash login prompt
My kernel takes ~1 for control to be passed to init so you can't get much faster then that
Re:Sleep a macbook (Score:3, Interesting)
I feel the pain of no mac now. My previous employer gave us all Macs. At the end of the day I would see what time it was, close the lid unplug it and go home. When I got home I would open it, and within a few seconds be right were I was when I left. I do the same in the morning to head back to work. My new employer has given me this damn Peecee which seems to be a total crap shoot if it'll actually resume or not. Sometimes it'll work fine, sometimes the USB keyboard/mouse wont work, sometimes it'll come back but wont connect to a network, sometimes all the application windows will just be a nice pretty consistent shade of gray. I moved from a linux laptop back before it was even an option to susspend so I just never did, to a Mac laptop that worked perfectly every time, to a windows laptop that seems to worked maybe 20% of the time. I've given up and just shutdown every night now.
Xubuntu, Custom Debian, Syllable, Haiku (Score:3, Interesting)
From the top of my head:
- (X)Ubuntu with a default XFCE enviroment. [xubuntu.org] Designed for very old computers and people who hate the Gnome/KDE slowpoking.
- Haiku OS [haiku-os.org]. OSS BeOS variant. Lightning fast, designed with the GUI in mind. Sub-10-seconds booting is rumored.
- The Syllable [syllable.org] OS. An OSS OS inspired by the proof-of-concept project Athena OS and some concepts implemented in BeOS. This one is actually quite interesting, as they've come quite far for a project that started from scratch without being a simple Unix rippoff. The site has demo videos showing Syllable coldboot into the Desktop under 10 seconds on older hardware and they've got quite a few apps ported to it allready, including a native browser using a pimped-out webkit renderer. Shutdown is sub 5 seconds (also important). They're working on a completely seperate server variant too. I consider this one a truely interesting alternate OS. You should check it out.
- Current Debian with a 2.2 kernel, Fluxbox or Windowmaker VM and a little tweaking should get you a very lightweight OS enviroment aswell.
Take any of the above and flash them onto a modern bios that you plug into your Mobo and your set for super-fast booting.
answer: puppy linux (Score:2, Interesting)
"What is the fastest booting operating system out there that is still sufficient for editing text?"
certainly: Puppy Linux [puppylinux.org].
7 seconds and you are ready
Re:Tandy 102 (Score:3, Interesting)
How about Damn Small Linux? (Score:2, Interesting)
Alphasmart works better for me than a laptop (Score:3, Interesting)
When I want to write NOW NOW NOW, I reach for my Alphasmart [wikipedia.org]. I like the instant-on ability, and the insanely long battery life.
What really makes me happy is that it doesn't have the usual distractions of a desktop. No internet, no games, no browsing, no music ...
It's a word processor. That's all it does, and it does that one thing very well indeed. And for creative, but easily distracted minds like mine, that's a real plus.
It doesn't host USB formatted drives, though it can be used as a USB keyboard to rapidly transfer your writing to another computer. Just plug it in and hit "send."
Re:Smartphone? (Score:3, Interesting)
Or have a cell phone which takes voice memos... Mine will record literally hours of voice memo with just the 20mb or so that's left on the 1GB SD card.
But perhaps the guy who submitted the question has a reason for wanting something to actually write the notes on. Possibly he wants to use it during meetings, where he can't speak?
Solved 20 Years Ago (Score:3, Interesting)
Twenty years ago I was using DOS. It booted almost instantly. If I wanted to, I might have edited autoexec.bat to include a command to launch an editor at the end of the boot. Or, I might have used a TSR like Sidekick that would have provided access to a text editor, and more, at the touch of a key.
Modern operating systems are several orders of magnitude larger than DOS. Hence, the longer boot times.
Remember, however, that Unix and Linux are text-based operating systems. You don't need to run X, the graphical interface, if you don't want to. You can alter the boot scripts of a Unix/Linux machine to stop at the text interface, ask you which interface you want to use, or just boot in text mode and launch a text editor.
Re:Smartphone? (Score:1, Interesting)
I had an iPhone that I bought and a Motorola Q that my work bought me. I can say that as a geek teh Q was light years ahaed of the iPhone. I am sure that the average consumer would prefer the iPhone but for a geek, the Q is way better. Hell. I was just at jiffylube getting my oil changed and I was using PuTTY on my Q to connect to out AIX servers to make sure everything is OK. A real life QWERTY keyboard is awesome. A touchepad is cool for squares but from a geek, a physical touchpad is essential.
Re:Suspend to disk? (Score:5, Interesting)
You don't need a new OS, you need a new motherboard.
Asus has "Express Gate" [neoseeker.com] on their newer mobos that allow you to boot into a web-surfing, email only mini OS [zdnet.co.uk] in "less than 5 seconds" without having to worry about whether you slept, suspended or hibernated the previous tme you shut down your PC.
Ok, its basically an on-board Linix distro, so you do need a better OS after all.
Not all motherboards run coreboot (Score:3, Interesting)
LinuxBIOS/Coreboot will get a system up in 3 seconds or less.
But requires a motherboard compatible with coreboot. Which do you recommend buying?
Re:Not hard (Score:2, Interesting)
AmigaOS (Score:4, Interesting)
I belive my Amiga booted in 8 seconds before I added all the patches, tools and accessories you wanted .. If you aborted the shell before loading Workbench you would probably shave off two-three seconds more ...
Had some miniemacs with the OS, and it seems it can use fat32:
http://www.amigahistory.co.uk/fat32.html [amigahistory.co.uk]
You can get USB aswell:
http://www.amigau.com/c-amiga/hardware.htm [amigau.com]
I realise it's not a viable alternative today, but it's kind of sad how bad things develop considering how much faster todays machines is.
Reminds me of a youtube video with a Mac Classic running Claris Works (or something similar) and a more modern PC running Office Word or whatever, boot systems booting up, running the word processor and then writing something (and eventually saving and turning the machine of as well.) .. And sometimes people don't need much more than that application offered.
Of course the new software is much more advanced, but the old mac did it faster
Re:Wake up (Score:3, Interesting)
Emacs is the friendliest editor, period. (Score:2, Interesting)
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)