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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?"
There's always BeOS, which prided itself on lightning-fast load times. Otherwise, a rather stripped down UNIX-alike would do you fine.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
Depending on the intended use, a minimal install of OpenBSD might do the trick.
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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.
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
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
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
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.
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
confession:
I have a IBM PC with a flip top case.
It is just too cool to get rid of.
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.
if you steal from one source, that is plagiarism, if you steal from many, well, that's just research.
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).
-- Alastair
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.
-- Alastair