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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?"
http://www.splashtop.com/
There you go.
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Embed PERL in firmware! :-)
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Oh, keep the autoexec.bat small.
What is their purpose?
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
Linux + hibernate (swsusp, TuxOnIce) functionality.
No sig, sorry.
There's always BeOS, which prided itself on lightning-fast load times. Otherwise, a rather stripped down UNIX-alike would do you fine.
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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.
Since Windows 98 IS nothing but DOS with a copy of Windows that autoloads once booted why not use it? You can even modify the initialization scripts to have it boot up with a DOS prompt and then type WIN to run Windows 98. Did it all the time back in the day.
More realistically, there is this interesting Linux distribution, Webconverger:
http://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.
why not use Windows XP Embedded its not that hard to install it supports older hardware... and it isnt resource intensive if setup correctly
there is " damn small linux " http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/ you could even install it in the /boot partition of fedora as a backup os
"I don't pitch OpenSUSE Linux to my friends, i let Microsoft do it for me
Reuse is good and and environmental and all, but: How much is your time worth? How many hours of your time to set up one of these older machines would buy a newer machine? And if energy costs are a concern (and why not): how much more efficient would the "right machine" for the task be, given the costs? I've never understood the tendency of companies to cheat on hardware costs - making someone jump through dozens of hours of hoops is far more costly than just buying the right hardware.
Depending on the intended use, a minimal install of OpenBSD might do the trick.
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DSL linux is really fast when installed on a Hdd.
Run linux and hibernate to the disk. It is hard to be more instant on from a fully off state.
Boot from a RAMdisk filesystem and make it as small as possible. Rip out all the startup scripts and write your own that just runs the one or two things you actually need running, runs ifconfig, route, etc. manually with hard-coded info (or starts dhclient/pump/dhcpcd). Compile the minimum number of possible drivers into the kernel and don't include any modules at all, nor tools to load modules. Include a bare-bones GUI layer like Nano-X and write your applications using pure Xlib if you can. Otherwise, use the most lightweight WM and GUI toolkit you can find (e.g. straight Tcl/Tk).
For permanent storage, mount a small (e.g. 300 MB) filesystem on a flash card so that the fsck takes just a couple of seconds even if forced. :-)
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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?
You haven't said what exactly these machines are going to be doing, but I fail to see why the extra time that one OS takes over another is a factor to deal with.
If it takes an extra 90 seconds to boot an OS that is stable and reliable, how does shaving that 90 seconds save anything?
Optimizing for boot time over everything else seems very foolish to me.
Having done a suspend to disk gets things going faster for me when I power up.
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/
http://www.puppylinux.org/
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
MenuetOS 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.
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.
Splashtop requires a new motherboard. Motherboards aren't always expensive.
But doesn't a new motherboard for a years-old PC typically have new, incompatible CPU and RAM sockets, which require a new CPU and new RAM? At that point, you're practically building a new PC with an old case and drives.
Some Panasonic Viera consumer HDTV sets run on a version of Linux. It takes 6 or 7 seconds to boot from ROM.
is FreeBSD. Enjoy.
he demonstrated by A plus B minus C divided by Z that the sheep must be red, and die of the rot
damn small linux. doesn't need hardly any specs at all, and boots very fast.
Windows Vista
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.
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NT4 or light weight Linux, Xubuntu, Feather, Damn Small Linux etc.. perhaps a real time kernel if they are appliances. I am assuming you can't or don't want to buy fast flash/NVRAM. Is wake on LAN an option in the BIOS? That may be helpful for keeping them off except when needed. Also the "Suspend" / Hibernate mode for Linux will bring it up quickly. If you can find all the apps you need then BeOS would be ideal. There are ways to have a nearly "instant on Linux" I am not an expert in trying to have it boot up fast, rather have it STAY up..Good Luck! Others will probably have similar comments, just trying to help. - Jeff
Heh - I'll toss in my two cents... AROS. It boots DAMN fast. AmigaOS was one of the fastest booting OSes made... next to maybe BeOS.
Use solid state memory instead of dynamic. This means that you can clock right down to zero Hertz. That saves beaucoup power. This would be easier with very old equipment.
The trouble is that you can't (as far as I know) get sticks with solid state memory on them. Very old equipment had socketed memory. There were also memory expansion boards that plugged into an ISA slot.
You could also copy solid state memory to dynamic as your boot routine.
I haven't actually tried the above ideas with a standard PC motherboard but those are exactly what you would do with embedded equipment. What I have done is run damnsmalllinux from a cf card, no hard drive. As long as your hardware never changes, you don't have to test for hardware in the boot routine. That saves bags of time. You could also save lots of time by skipping the memory test, but I wouldn't do that for most applications. For the embedded chips I use, memory checking isn't done but that memory is measured in tens of K. If the memory goes bad, the application works wrong and we do test for that.
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.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
so long as you dont have many extension...
I have to agree that this is a pointless discussion. As long as we don't know the purpose or application required, the OS discussion is pointless. The application will usually dictate the environment, not the other way around.
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
A friend of mine, back in High School had a Tanday X86 compatible machine. It had DOS onboard in a ROM, if you hit the reset button it would be back at a C:> before your finger was off the button.
Seems like I used to see some sort of Windows accelerator cards in the mid 90's at Incredible Universe, never heard of one being used, but from what I understand they had part/most of Windows 95 on there for a performance boost, maybe you had to flash it.
Old Macs had ROM based OS's, they didn't necessarily boot that fast.
Try a RAM based solid state HDD. The will help the OS to load as quickly as the bus will allow. BeOS may be the quickest for you, if it will do what you want.
The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
You could probably recompile the kernel to not require a initrd to load it. You could then use a window manager that loads fast.
You could also just set the computer to hibernate... that doesn't require any power.
If it's an applicance, why not start from scratch?
I mean, just get the necessary drivers/libraries, stick-em up together and voilÃ, there you go.
Why bother with a complete OS when you have a fixed hardware; you power-up, you setup your stack pointers, then setup your hardware. How long can it take?
Do you really have to do all the extraneous stuff an OS will do?
I used to program industrial machines running on 8 bit Motorola chips; Iâ(TM)d burn an Eprom then stick it in the prototype. I had to basically write my own OS; Iâ(TM)d merely do the bare minimum I needed and the thing ran perfectly fast enough.
it had to be said...
If you go with 'pure' Fedora and some trusty instructions then you should be able to get less than a minute boot time, even with venerable hardware. Furthermore, you should be able to setup the box quickly. Here are some instructions you may want to borrow:
http://www.improvedsource.com/view.php/Linux-System/2/
You can customise how you setup your networking from there. Other tips: install server rather than workstation (no X-display) and tweak the BIOS so that it does not tick through the RAM or search for floppy/CD drives.
The advantage of Fedora is that it is standard enough for others to use without any 'sudo' nonsense at every turn and there are no proprietary-code-kernal-blobs to load.
Clean shut-downs are needed if you don't want corrupted disks or long boot times - make sure the on/off switch gets handled in the BIOS and O/S to do that correctly before you take the monitor away.
If you can get away with just putting the computer to sleep, rather than powering it off entirely, S3 sleep (suspend to RAM) works pretty well on modern hardware. Pretty much instantaneous sleep and resume.
You can build an embedded version of QNX which has only what you need for your dedicated application. If you boot QNX from disk in a full configuration using "diskboot", it takes about 15 seconds, but that's a whole development configuration. You can build a custom boot image with "mkifs" containing only the OS, drivers, services, applications, and shared objects you need. QNX is designed for that. (Some fancier car stereos have a QNX system inside.)
If the machine doesn't need any state saved locally from boot to boot, you can build a diskless system and boot it from flash memory. On suitable hardware, you can run it from ROM, although that's generally done on rather small machines like an ARM.
Isn't this the sort of thing gentoo linux was made for (and not used for anymore)?
... built off BeOS, I thinks ;)
Windows ME all the way! My ME laptop is an 850MHz P3 with 128 MB of ram and it boots from completely off to all services and processes running in about 10-15 seconds. It shuts off from being ran for 4 hours to completely off in 4 seconds! Standby is even fsater.
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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?
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.
1 (short ton / firkin) = 89.1432354 slugs / keg
What do you mean about "application appliances"?
Depending on what "application" you want to run, you dont need an OS at all - you can run it directly from GRUB.
If your app needs an OS (filesystem, device driver, network...), you can strip-down some lightweight linux distro (such as DSL), or try some highly configurable, build-your-own distro (such as LFS, or Gentoo) to meet the minimum requirements you need.
Try Googling about "JEOS" (Just Enough OS)
Several years back, I noted that a clean, fresh install of W2K was quite zippy, responsive, and quick-to-boot, until I patched it up to SP4 (at which point it immediately became a bear).
I've always suspected that the constant security patches degrade whatever performance optimizations were present in the OS at release time. I offer no proof that this is by design (although, theoretically, this would motivate upgrades).
If these boxes aren't on the network...give it a shot with any older, unpatched OS.
I really wish that I could recommend a flavor of Linux so that I didn't sound like some MS fanboy...but oh well.
XP with a suspend button.
Modding me -1 troll doesn't make me wrong.
LinuxBIOS is going to be _the_ fastest solution, but may not be the most workable: http://downloads.sourceforge.net/fornix/linuxbios.ogg
one more hint:
try out "Texas Flood" Init System:
http://www.resulinux.forumdebian.com.br/texasfloodweb/index.html
the eeepc 's fast init that asus put in xandros makes it boot fast fast fast
here is a re implementation of it
http://helllabs.org/finit/
back in the day we didnt have no old school
http://dban.sourceforge.net/ Boots quick and always leaves you lots of room on your HDD :).
Har?
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
I used to get boot times of 1-2 seconds. It was really easy too. Just set your bios to error when no keyboard is present, and unplug the keyboard. This will drastically reduce your time to boot.
Modding me -1 troll doesn't make me wrong.
http://www.oberon.ethz.ch/
Oberon boots fairly quickly.
Now, WTF did you want the appliance to do?
I have not seen such a meaningless questions since, er, the last "ask slashdot".
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http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/06/28/1148245
You can shave 10 seconds off if the computer knows someone's going to walk up and boot it soon...
Re-purpose for WHAT?
Just write your own OS. :) I did. Took me several years though.
Big a real server, and thin clients. Saves time and power.
The FreeBSD Handbook, Google and a couple hours will have you recompiling the kernel to suit your needs with ease, and it'll boot in no time.
Ever see the live cd accelerated knoppix disk? It was pretty amazing to watch, so fast. But you could do the same, you optimize to reduce seek, use only the very basic packages you need, and put it on a always mounted flash disk file system.
Turn them on. Time the time-to-desktop or other end end point in the boot process. Look at how long it took. The try to justify why you have to have them up and running faster than the minute or two it takes. What is it for, the NORAD anti-missile defense system? Flip the switch and go take a leak, they'll be ready when you get back.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Use hibernation. Windows XP and GNU/Linux boot from hibernation in just a few moments and it works so well that I use it even on my main computer, partially because it has the added benefit that the computer remembers exactly what I was doing before I pressed the off-button.
But if your appliance doesn't have a hard disk that can cause a problem. In that case, try Accellerated Knoppix, which boots very quickly from CD because it sort of sorts all its startup files on the disk. Maybe you can take the component that makes it boot fast and use it with Damn Small Linux, or even with Debian if that would suit your needs better.
Of course, DOS booted in just a few seconds...
DSL strips Debian and then uses a lightweight window manager. Fluxbox or JWM. This uses less memory and allows faster response including boot.
You can do this yourself. Install Debian without a window manager and then add one with aptitude.
Plus you don't need all of those compiled for DSL packages. (Extensins)
This is what I did for my XMAME console and Jukebox.
I had a machine with DOS 3.3 in ROM. I loved it. I miss it. For no other reason than the instant-on. Same goes for the Tandy Model 100.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
As long as you're not trying to load up Fedora or Ubuntu or whatnot Linux can load very quickly. NetBSD, OpenBSD and FreeBSD also a fast booters. Faster still is to use the suspend-to-disk option in Windows, Linux, etc.
You don't even have to use an old version of Linux. 2.6 kernels will do just fine. LFS or Slackware are a couple fast booters.
Mostly I think your question is lacking in information to be properly answered. Try to ask smarter questions.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Try das-boot. It has SD card support, networking, yadda yadda.
The fastest boot on any Linux is 5seconds.
DasBoot will come in 1second.
Its hard not to get all caught up in sexy Linux, but sometimes you have a simple task to do.
Austrumi Linux, fastest by far, booting and running, of any of the mini linux distros I have tried, and will work on (not ridiculously, but modest) older hardware pretty well.
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.
You can choose Linux, or Free- or NetBSD, but build a custom kernel that only includes drivers that you're going to use. See if there's any code you can leave out. Ditch all the binaries you don't need, and make sure your rc scripts are skinned down to the bone. No swap space, and a single-partition disk, that's read-only if you can do it.
In general, modern software that's been stripped down will have as good or better performance than old software, especially when it comes to things like bugs.
Oh, now that I answered the question in the title, I have to fill up the text box for this post too? OK, blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah...
http://www.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.
I've found hibernation to be good on all modern OSes, and quick as well. Oddly enough, the less RAM the system has, the quicker it starts up ;)
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
Why not use Vmware and just pause the OS running the application? Assuming the directive is that these applications cannot be left running not so much a computer such as a host with not other use.
I have heavily modified Slackware 10.2 with my own installer, packaging system and so on. Someone might call it "just another distro". It boots into X11 (qvwm 1.1.12 window manager) in about 20s on Pentium 100 MHz, 64MB RAM, 4GB IDE disk. On current 3 year old computer (HP nx6110, celeron 1.4 GHz) it do the same in 14s. So my advice. Use some "modifiable" linux such as Slackware and tune it up.
way back in the late 1980s, my parents bought an AT or XT clone
Geez, I used an XT in the late 80s. Now I feel old.
Contiki - runs also on your Commodore 64:
http://www.sics.se/contiki/
AROS - boots in seconds:
http://www.aros.org
Does it support standby and/or hibernate mode? If so, then Windows 2000 or Windows XP will work nicely. Virtually 0 power consumption but will wake up in about a minute.
TANSTAAFL GIGO Acronyms to live by!
You could try an x86 build of OpenWRT and use CF rather than HDD. On router devices, OpenWRT boots up in about 10 seconds, but I'm sure the BIOS on a PC would add to the bootup time. I haven't tried it on a PC but I've seen that others have.
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.
Of course I didn't RTFA... why would I do that? You really are new here aren't you? Don't let my UID fool you.
It's possible to boot some *nixes from a RAM image - like when resuming from hibernation/Suspend to Disk. I suggest booting the actual OS from the image and putting the home folder on a different partition in the hard drive.
The advantage of this is that it bypasses init (or upstart, sysvinit, launchd or whichever startup daemon you're using) and boots things into a state which works immediately.
Those using pirated Tinysoft signatures(TM) are a real threat to society and should all be thrown in jail.
1.6ghz Athlon KX7-333 WD 80G hdd
Nlited W2k3 on a FAT32 partition.
Power to Desktop. ~8 seconds
Post to Desktop ~6 seconds
Logo to Desktop ~4 seconds.
Shutdown to Poweroff ~3 seconds.
Nothing "important" stripped.
No Sleep or Hibernate.
Used as daily machine browsing, games, etc.
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?
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!
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
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
Puppy home page: http://www.puppylinux.org/
This is a signature..
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.
Why isn't freebsd mentioned more? It boots in less than 10 seconds when correctly configured, even on old hardware
I have been able to get slackware 12 to boot in under 30 seconds on a 800MHz system with 128MB RAM. You just have to tweak the startup scripts. I don't know about a slower system, but I would think you could do better than 5 minutes.
Turn off all unnecessary services. Disable the pcmcia script if your system doesn't have it (not only does the probing take time, the script has a 'sleep 5' in it!) Comment out the lines to update the fonts and ldconfig at boot. (apparently added for MCSEs?) Also make sure you don't run a GNOME or KDE display manager. xdm works fine. I am sure you could find other ways to optimise boot, like preloading some files into the cache or backgrounding DHCP if the server is slow, etc...
Try QNX, VxWorks or other Embedded OSs. Some of them are able to boot within a few seconds.
Siemens Nixdorf once sold a desktop computer that could boot a subset of Windows 3.1 in time to answer a ringing fax. That may be quick enough, but I don't know if it will meet your other requirements once it's booted up.
"Good news, everyone!"
Any real modem (i.e. DSP onboard) should work with just about any Linux distro. The Winmodems use custom drivers, essentially using CPU functionality to emulate the guts of a real modem. The $5 cheapies won't help you, but real modems aren't all that expensive. Used one for years before I finally went broadband. AFAIK, any modern distro stull has tools for dealing with serial modems, though you may have to dig for them.
While driver support is improving (the new CUPS finally supports the Canon IP3000, after years of using the Turboprint third-party closed-source driver package), I agree that you're unlikely to find a driver for the K6 generation of hardware. I doubt Vista supports that stuff, either.
Tech Public Policy stuff
As most people said: it entirely depends on your application, but Minix (www.minix3.org) boots darn fast. It has some serious downsides (such as limited software availability and lack of drivers), but if you get it to work it works like a charm. Also, the microkernel design is clearly superior to the monolithic kernel design many operating systems use these days :P
And when they are off they stil are drawing 10-75 watt, until you unplug them.
Providing the computers aren't too old (P2 300 is fine) and have enough ram (128Mb is fine), then running XP and hibernating has a pretty good balance between something that will work without too much effort and quick boot time. It's easy to set so that the power button hibernates.
Get free bitcoins: http://freebitco.in
... you could always just make your own distro, and decide exactly which apps you need and which you don't. http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/
you can try dyne:bolic is a quick snap to boot from CD or USB or copying a dir over samba, plus it comes with lots of apps pre-installed, less than 700MB of occupation
using 98Lite from LitePC you can make a very maen and lean installation of Windows 98. They boast unbelievable boot times. You can load it into CF card ...
We all want our 250mbit, really ... oh, you guys are talking about a PSU .. right .. back to work ...
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
Build yourself an initrd / initramfs. I use it for "picture frames" and a minimal Multimedia Box. My MM Box bootet before the CRT monitor connected to it, shows its picture... If you need a few scripts (for debian) just send a mail... have a nice day simon
You might try MenuetOS. (Google for it)
Sony uses the Linux kernel too in its HDTVs and many other products. Here is the link to download the source (cookies and JS required).
The cf takes the place of a hard drive during the boot process. Once the system is booted, everything runs in (dynamic) ram and the cf isn't used until the computer is shut down and the data in ram is stored to the cf. Damnsmalllinux does this because cf can only be written a few million times before it 'wears out'.
The point of that part of the post was that the boot process can be speeded up a lot for a dedicated appliance.
A CF based disk will boot fast as well as a ssd.
If you use a pin-adapter to directly plug the compact flash card into an IDE port for the motherboard, bear in mind that not all CF support UDMA modes.
Specially with Sandisk : UDMA is very often only available on the more expensive "industrial" variants of cards, the "consumer" variants you find in computer & photo shops have UDMA support disabled.
I've read somewhere that Lexar offers UDMA 133 on their "consumer" card, but I haven't had time to test it.
if the DMA modes supported by the card and the DMA modes supports by the host controller aren't compatible, you'll end up having to switch back to PIO mode which is much slower.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
A fast booting OS is not the same as a minimal OS. So suggestions to use Puppy or DSL are not exactly the best advice...
Here's some practical information:
Currently, the best route to a fast booting computer is to customise your own Linux system, ideally from a host computer running Gentoo. (Gentoo gives you lots of flexibility with compile options and you can specify exactly which packages you want installed, and where.)
It's best to use a custom kernel (try to avoid using modules). The size of the kernel (ie. how much of the hardware features you compile into it) doesn't have a significant bearing on boot times.
Make sure you boot using the 'quiet' option on the kernel line (showing the progress text slows things down a LOT!).
Apart from the kernel, the only other necessary packages are: glibc, busybox and grub (or some other bootloader).
Use busybox's init system: there are no runlevels, everything's in one script: /etc/init.d/rcS Don't start any services unless you really need them - udev is handy, but busybox's mdev works fine too. For most small systems, you don't need anything else!
You can boot to a command line (busybox's ASH) in about 15s, depending on how long your BIOS takes to clear the initial checks.
And, yes, of course, someone's already done this; it's designed to run an Amiga emulator. The technical documentation is thorough and should give you enough to start: http://www.xamiga.net
the kernel can be stripped to boot quite quickly. Hibernation i agree, is also a good option with power off.
Good people go to bed earlier.
My Mythbox uses suspend to RAM. If you pick the right components, Linux will have no issues.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Without more information on what these appliances are supposed to do it's difficult to get the best coarse of action.
If these systems were going to be headless (no monitor) I would recommend one system on all the time. Running the free Linux VMware server or Zen. You can suspend the guest OS systems then the turn them "on" in about 15 seconds. And you can do it remotely.
Needing to have the systems powered off kills the prospect of a fast boot is you can't get to it remotely. Otherwise to "fast boot" powered off systems you will need to have a guy sitting there ready to turn them on within 15 seconds of a request.
I was given an old P3-600 Sony laptop with a dead battery. Turns out it only needed a new disk, and it badly needed to get rid of Windows ME.
Because of the dead battery (which is too expensive to replace), it's important that I get quick boot times, and XP hibernation is the answer. I can go from unplugged/unpowered to full desktop in six seconds. One reason why it's so fast is because it only had 256MB of ram, so the memory image loads fast. I love it.
Because of this positive experience with XP, i decided to load it up on my living room networked media PC (also gifted). It runs on a very inefficient P4 Celeron, so it shouldn't be left on. However, it's also sometimes needed as an FTP server, in case I need to retrieve some files from work. Luckily, XP hibernate is fully compatible with Wake-on-Lan. This means that all I need to do is to send a magic packet from work to my server and bedroom computer, wait a few seconds, and then everything works. The trickier part is remotely turning putting them back on hibernate, for which I use TightVNC.
I have had good success with quick booting with Windows 2000/XP + Hibernate instead of shut down.
And BeOS naturally booted very quickly - of course your hardware is probably too /new/.
You can use buildroot to make your own Linux Distro, I use it for embedded devices. A 300MHz board boots in exactly 4 seconds for the kernel part (including network). Add a few seconds for the bootloader and the applications and it's less than 10 seconds. Of course it's pretty minimalistic, no X-windows !
Non-Linux Penguins ?
A stripped slackware or gentoo.
The setup we use:
Server: RHEL4 with LTSP installed
Clients: No hard disk installed
We have recycled a number of old PC's using PXE, CDROM or floppy to boot from LAN.
The client at my desk will boot from power on to login prompt using a CD in 47 seconds. If the PC had a PXE NIC we could shave a few more seconds off. If the clients were on the same VLAN as the server I think the time would be in the 30 second range.
See ltsp.org for more details
My laptop is on older Dell (P3 1 GHz), and I use suspend to disk to get very good boot times with Linux. Suspend to ram would be better, but it isn't reliable on this model. You may have to do some hacking to make sure that the users can only "turn it off" by suspending to ram, but it would be worth it for your needs.
------- Mark
He didn't really explain the savings from keeping the machine powered off. Perhaps he could use the BIOS option (available in some machines) that automatically powers off at the end of the day and back on in the morning... this would save about 2/3 of the power (the machine would be on for only 8 hours). For the odd off-hours use, the 2 minutes to boot the machine could probably be tolerate. The cost savings from the power use really willn't amout to much. He could get an equivalent savings by replacing the monitor with an LCD screen (although the eco-footprint from disposing of the monitor is substantial). He could tape a big sign on all the monitors (LCD included) "turn off when not in use".
What I'm really confused about his need for "instant booting" at a company that is too cheap to pony up for a couple of dollars a year worth of electricity. Are the employees' time so valuable, that the 2 or 3 minutes spent while the machine is booting incredibly costly? A new machine--and/or OS will probably take two or three hours per machine to install; if the speed up in booting is 2 minutes (from 3 to 1 minute) than it will take 90 boot cycles (180 minutes / 2 minutes) to pay for the time savings (ignoring the cost of the new machines and disposal on the old ones). If these machines are used "infrequently" (say twice a week) then the time saving will take about a year. The employees have to make sure they start working the instant the machine boots--no turning on the machine and getting a cup of coffee (not at what these employees are being paid!).
This is a solution searching for a problem--if the OP wants to buy some new gadgets/OS then fine... but this isn't a "business case".
The old Commodore and Atari boot-from-ROM machines usually started in 2-3 seconds or less.
Even the Mac Classic would boot in 10-15 seconds to its "ROMDisk" - it had a bootable disk image in spare ROM that could be activated with magic keystrokes.
ThinStation boots remarkably fast from flash but it's pretty bare-bones.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
What's the problem with that? Modern OS, fairly well tested, all the network stuff, etc. And it's pretty fast (well, my Dell is) coming up out of hibernation.
Nice thing about that is, you can actually have the apps you want already loaded!
*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.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
What does the OS have to provide? Without knowing that there's not way to answer your question, since the quickest possible booting OS would do only those things you NEED it to do.
Never heard of Machboot eh?
10 seconds bit-hez
Can put all of Windows CE or a real Java SDK in that. No more working with crippled OSes.
Maybe he just might as well go with emacs.
Saying "I'll probably get modded down for this" in a post is the best way to get it modded up.
http://www.splashtop.com/open_source.php
not sure if this will work for more than one download:
http://www.splashtop.com/download3.php?token=65eb5d4d45596da51f6a92f44811e0a2
WindowsXP + hibernate. The less RAM on the machine, the smaller the hibernate file, the quicker the resume. Don't know if WinFLP retains hibernate capability, but if not, you can lean out XP as needed to only the required functions.
It resumes reasonably quickly on my 1Ghz Celeron-256MB RAM.
Windows 2000 also has hibernate capability, though I think XP is better.
Ubuntu on my PIII takes as long to resume from hibernate as it does to cold boot, a good 3-5 minutes.
What it will support really depends on "how old" the machine, and "what do you need it to do?" But assuming you don't need flash web browsing, XP will run satisfactorily on a PII-350 with 160MB RAM for word processing, light web browsing, etc.
Not sure what exactly you are trying to do, but there are several small Linux distros that boot off of a single floppy disc. Do a slight rewrite and get it to boot off the harddrive. An OS that is under 2 meg on a HD should run relatively fast, although you will be greatly limited by what you can do.
I recall that the folks who are optimizing Linux for the Asus Eee and other "netbooks" have gotten a version of init working that does exactly what the above comments said BeOS did: defer most initialization until after the OS finishes launching.
I can't be bothered reading all these comments to see if someone else mentioned it. Too many slashdotters seem to be stuck on linux. BeOS/Zeta boot hella fast. I don't know if you can get Zeta anymore, I think I read that Yellowtab went out of business. But on my old Celeron-600 machine it would boot in like 17 seconds, compared to WinXP booting in roughly 1:30. I believe it's built on GCC 2.95, and is POSIX compliant.
DexOS/Dex4u (dex4u.com)
Core Distro doesn't offer tech support and doesn't hold your hand, but it's a lean, mean, fast CLI Linux.
eComStation is an update to IBM's OS/2. It will run all the commercial OS/2 applications. There are ports of lots of BSD, GNU, and other open source software for it. That includes OpenOffice. It comes with Firefox and a Java system. It also runs Windows 3.1 software, and has a WINE-like clone of 32-bit Windows APIs that runs some applications for newer Windows versions.
eComStation runs on a Pentium 133 or a dual-core Athlon. The minimum RAM for a CD installer is 48MB, but the installed system will run with as little as 32MB, with 64MB a recommended minimum. It'll support up to 4GB. As little as 500MB of hard drive will store the system, with 1GB recommended for a full installation. You can get a 20GB drive dirt cheap these days. There's no Bluetooth support and not all hardware has drivers, but a well-supported machine with this runs like wild cheetahs.
At $259 per seat for a non-upgrade version, though, it's cheaper to build a bargain basement new PC and put a free OS on it. There's a free eComStation demo CD, but it requires 160MB of RAM as it's a live CD.
You can always try turning off any motherboard features you don't use in the BIOS, disabling keyboard and video checks, disabling the memory tests, and switching to whatever your systems call "fast POST" or "quick POST". That'll cut down on the hardware's portion of the boot time.
If multitasking is the reason for not using DOS and you're developing your own applications, there are a few multitasking libraries out there for DOS applications. The OS doesn't offer multitasking support, but it doesn't get in the way of it either. There are also a number of alternative DOS versions which offer everything from multitasking and multiple users to built-in memory extenders and support for filesystems other than FAT.
Sooo... let me see if I understand this properly. One part prefix + one part noun = ... verb?
Cool, let me see if I can un-chicken the kichen table just before I inter-poop. Woo. Epic fail there. And now I've got feathers and feces all over the linoleum.
Download nLite and slim down a version of windows 98. I had an old, old laptop (Pentium 100 w 16MB EDO) which had been running Windows 95. Since the default install of 98 was taking a large portion of the drive (only 1.2 GB or so) I decided to upgrade to an nLite'd 98se install.
The install only consumed about 200mb of disk space, IIRC, without doing anything drastic; you can cut it down more by doing things like installing the Win95 exporer instead of the Win98 one. Boot times are about 10, maybe 15 seconds -- and that's with a 100Mhz pentium, 16megs of ram, and an old, slow laptop hard drive (probably 1/4 the speed of even a 5400rpm desktop drive.) After stripping off the unneeded cruft, Win98 is pretty responsive and stable.
Heck, if you don't need to run explorer for your app you can shave off some significant processing and ram overhead. I knew a guy who set up two partitions of Win98 on his laptop -- one was standard, the other was nLite'd to the bare-minimum it took to run CounterStrike. As you can guess, that partition booted straight into fullscreen CS. He said that overall performance increased 5-7 fps. If you just need to run a couple non-GUI apps, this might be the way to go.
http://linuxdevices.com/news/NS4123264934.html
What have they done?
The way to go?
You might what to take a look at Zbors ZDOS and ZBIOS. I have seen up and fully booted within seconds of power-on. On a ordinary 486 PC!
http://www.zebor.com/main/index_eng.html
If you have to use windows, there is a program called nLite which will customize a windows XP installation disk. You can remove a truckload of unnecessary stuff, and it will boot amazingly fast. I tried it inside a virtual machine, and I was amazed when it booted in a like 10 seconds. The windows bootup logo stayed on for literally 3 seconds.
extending the power switch to a location that is both on the way and approximately a 30 seconds' walk to the terminal.
Try Vectorlinux
"so an old version of Linux or Windows 98 are possible"
"so an old version of Linux or Windows 98 is possible"
ByzantineOS (based on Mozilla) boots quite quickly (at least it did last time I used it).
Video Production Support
Assuming your system is "new" enough to support this feature, it's a no-brainer. Modern PCs suck about as much power in standby as they do when they're "off". My gaming rig draws about 7 watts when "off" and about 7 watts in standby. As far as my electric bill is concerned, there is no difference.
Of course, since you didn't tell us (even in general terms) what kind of hardware you have or what kind of software you need to run, that's as much effort as I'm putting into a response.
FreeDOS is out there, and really quick as I recall. It depends on what you're doing, but lots of little stuff still complies and runs on DOS systems.
Spyder
If your need a GUI Puppy Linux will be hard to beat.
If you don't require a gui then FreeBSD installed the least overhead bloat. Also.... If you are able
geek your way thru a build kernel you can really make a small fast box.
If you could order a couple of these... Ah router boards... (Awsome embedded linux box). Just don't call them computers.
http://www.mini-box.com/Alix-3C-Board-3-LAN-1-MINI-PCI-1_2?sc=8&category=754
I just checked the documentation on EROS (Jonathan Shapiro, University of PA) and it runs on 486's. I don't know about the newer CapROS (John Hopkins now) which you can find on sourceforge. I'm not sure what software will run on it but it is REALLY fast booting according to an old research paper I read years ago.
The fastest booting system I've had in recent years was a Pentium (II?) 266 with OpenBSD that booted in about 30 seconds including BIOS. Not the most fun to manage, but it's a good system.
Now the fastest ever was my old 7Mhz Amiga 1000 booting off the RAD: disk. But that requires booting, loading the RAD: and rebooting. But you're booting from main memory, so it took about 5 seconds.
From wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AmigaOS)
"The Amiga OS also has support for a fixed-capacity recoverable RAM disk, which functions as a standard RAM disk, but can maintain its contents on restart. It is commonly called the RAD disk, and it can be used as a boot disk (with boot sector)."
http://distrowatch.com/?newsid=04910
Windows 95 is fast. Faster than 98.... ReactOS, though in alpha and not entirely stable, is extremely fast booting and runs a lot of existing win32 software.
If you use XP Embedded as your OS (which would make sense given the application) you could enable WDP (Windows Disk Protection) and use HORM (Hibernate Once Resume Many). You just hibernate the system in the state that you would like it in, turn on WDP and BOOM! Fast booting in to your app... plus you don't need to write as script or something to automaticly start your app.
It's Enhanced Write Filter... not WDP. WDP is the same feature used in Windows SteadyState... it's just a different acronym for the exact same thing. Sorry. Linky: http://blogs.msdn.com/astebner/archive/2004/12/01/273462.aspx
Its got a networking stack, GUI's, HTML Browsers, VNC...
---- Booth was a patriot ----
fast, cheap, old... Which two do you want?
Why exactly do the machines need to be powered off? Is it to save energy consumption or some other idea upper management has?
I ask only because my company has jumped headlong into the "going green" movement and the policies initially created around that idea, while they meant well, were written by suits and HR folks instead of engineers. This meant they were horribly inefficient in trying to be efficient.
Yes, you could solve the issue of having to turn on and turn off the machines and even automate the process, but unless powering them up and down has an actual benefit it is all a waste of time, money and resources. Which is likely the exact opposite of why they gave that directive. They just don't know any better.
I used to use Hibernate with Windows XP. It was fast and reliable enough on my laptop that I never used sleep mode. Hibernate's speed depends on the amount of RAM and the speed of the disk.
No, I will not work for your startup