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?"

Comments

BeOS?

[Chonine]

Back in the day, BeOS booted in 6 seconds to a fully usable desktop (6 seconds after the POST). I don't think that is what you are looking for though, and I don't know how far the Free clone, Haiku, has come.

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.

re

[JohnVanVliet]

there is " damn small linux " http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/ you could even install it in the /boot partition of fedora as a backup os

DSL and Puppy

[steveha]

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

BeOS

[Lulu of the Lotus-Ea]

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:BeOS

[blueapples]

we'll never know what could have been.

Maybe we will - http://www.haiku-os.org/

Re:Splashtop

[hairyfeet]

Use either DSL or puppy. I have used both on older hardware and installed on the HDD the boot is very fast. You could probably speed up the process even more if you compiled it for the specific hardware.