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Fast-Booting Text-Editor Operating System?
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."
You could go with a straight BusyBox, or add a slightly more robust text editor to the enviornment.
Then compile that into your initramfs, and just don't bother to do a switch_root to a real file system. As long as you've got the hardware and filesystem drivers compiled into the kernel, life is good.
See http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/ for more details.
This use-case is one where I would not recommend emacs.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
My laptop never shuts down, I always just put it to sleep. Flip open, hack away. Less than 5 seconds. Oh, that's under Ubuntu, by the way.
Most modern O/S support suspend to disk which can give you a usable desktop in under 20s. Per your example both XP and Ubuntu can do it in that time. And that's ignoring the even faster suspend to ram which almost all laptops feature these days (granted that for that there is a power requirement).
It's not in the 'spirit' of your question, but perhaps it's a better solution to your problem?
Windows in 6 Bytes (IA-32) : 90 90 90 90 CD 19
tomsroot http://www.toms.net/rb/
-Alex. http://bit.ly/1iVPtfA
How about DOS?
boot a GUI-less linux install and use pico/nano for text editing.
all the key commands are shown at the bottom of the screen.
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
Windows Vista Ultimate. Just get a sharpie and write on the screen.
So, you want fast booting?
Get FreeDOS and one of the text editors from here.
I can't think of anything that will boot faster, although EMACS will likely be the friendliest editor available.
I'd say Stallman's first OS:
doofus@hotdog:~$ time emacs -nw
real 0m2.075s
user 0m0.372s
sys 0m0.076s
doofus@hotdog:~$
DOS Edit does a good job at basic text editing -- and on any reasonably modern laptop, DOS should boot amazingly quickly.
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.)
Paleotechnologist and connoisseur of pretty shiny things.
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.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
Psion series 3
I don't know if all of E-Macs would be loadable in the limited time frames you are talking about but VI certainly could.
If you press 'i' after you load VI you will experienced a notepad like editing experience that couldn't be easier. When you are done just press esc then x to save and exit or q! to exit without saving. when you see q! think, "quit damnit".
When the Apple TiBook first came out (before the days MacOSX), I got one and installed PPC linux on it. I was always amazed by how quickly it booted, around 20seconds. Of course, if you're also running XP, this probably won't work for you...
M0571y H@rml355.
Sometimes it takes me longer than that to find a pen or pencil!
Probably get you to an editor in 10 seconds or so...
Oh, probably no vi editor...
a typewriter?
Point 1: Sleep and wake actually works on MacOS/X
(and doesn't make you log in again)
Point 2. You get a mac!
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Graphite HP works for me!
http://www.crash-override.net/nethacklinuxdownload.html
boots from a floppy.
0) generate character
1) find magic marker
2) scribble on the floor
doesn't boot any faster than the others but the Sleep mode works properly there. Shut the lid when finished, open lid for doing stuffþ 5 seconds later (or less) you can start working. Win has not been reliable in sleep mode (don't know if Vista has gotten its act together on that front) and as much as I love Ubuntu it does have some downsides on notebooks (being fixed as we speak but still a bit of work to do)
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.
Hibernate. My laptop boots in about 20-30 seconds, with windows XP. I hear Ubuntu boots faster out of hibernation.
Or you could get a cell phone with a note-taking function. My work-provided Palm Treo does this, Blackberrys do, iPhones... Hell, even phones without a full keyboard typically have a notes application these days, and you can type fairly fast with T9-word.
I think you're asking the wrong question here. Any decent laptop with Linux or XP or OSX should be able to go into suspend mode and resume in about 2-8 seconds. I think my laptop hasn't been 'rebooted' in about two months, I just leave it constantly in suspend mode and activate it for 5-30 minutes at a time.
Even if you get a near instant booting OS just the Power on Self Test is going to take longer than resuming from a suspend.
Why would you ever turn off a laptop?
My Macbook Pro is always on. I close the lid and it sleeps. When I open the lid it's up and running in about 2-5 seconds.
God bless Apple!
Many of these will boot in less than 3 sec to a command console.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
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.
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
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 :)
I recommend a solution of hydrocyanic acid.
Next question.
Edward@Tomato - /home/Edward/ man woman
man: no entry for woman in the manual.
"Qua!?"
run sysv-rc-conf, remove gdm BOOM 30 seconds off of your ubuntu boot time and ready to edit with vi/pico/nano, etc. How hard was that?
I am a viral sig. Please copy me and help me spread. Thank you.
It takes a normal person more than 60 seconds on an average to search all of his/her pockets and bags and for a ballpoint pen before he/she realizes that another one has disappeared.
It boots into Appleworks in ten seconds flat. 'Nuff said.
Slashdot's first reaction to VMware
This sounds like a task for your modern PDA/phone. If you only ever write a line or two then there's no need to use a laptop to jot down ideas.
Seriously, get it on eBay for a few bucks.
It's smaller than a netbook, and runs on 3xAA batteries (lasts 2-3 weeks on them!), and it boots in a second.
It runs a DOS 2.11 clone, and comes complete with a simple and easy to use editor and a spreadsheet and some other stuff.
It doesn't come with USB, but can do nullmodem transfers with a serial port attachment. For added ease of use, buy one with a CompactFlash reader built in (there is someone who modifies them for this purpose).
Seriously, if all you want to do is quick notetaking, this is your ideal tool.
(For added geek value, it comes with a 8088 CPU made by OKI and can run most DOS programs that use proper BIOS and DOS calls instead of the faster tricks from that era. This is because the hardware isn't actually IBM compatible, but the BIOS provides the compatibility layer, so programs which circumvent the BIOS and attempt to address the hardware directly will not run.)
I suffer from attention surplus disorder.
www.menuetos.org
Both 64 and 32 bit versions.
I think you'll find that boots *Very* fast.
Open Source Drum Kit, LPLC deve board - mjhdesigns.com
I haven't personally tried it but from this about DeadMini http://linux.softpedia.com/get/System/Operating-Systems/Linux-Distributions/DeadMini-11601.shtml might have something you can use...
"The main advantage is that it boots anywhere - wherever you can stick the files, use something like syslinux or isolinux to make it boot - and of course make bios boot the medium - it will boot without a trouble. This is because the whole system (currently 5MB, including booting overhead) is copied in RAM without the need to seek the source device. It also boots very fast - minimal bootup time is about 3s (further testing will be done)."
"Both feel like an eternity if there isn't a pen and paper around."
The problem seems kind of artifical if you're fine working with paper anyway. Otherwise, I'd resort to just leave the machine on, which I usually do anyway.
I started using the TextGuru application on my iPhone. With it, I can actually get work done on airplanes. Very fast to get up and running.
I hate to sound like an advertisement... but:
Neo by alphasmart
http://www.alphasmart.com/Retail/
Affordable. Only $219 a new lower price and a fraction of the cost of a standard laptop
Flexible. Send text direct to PC, Mac, or USB printer
Incredible battery life. Up to 700 hours on 3 alkaline batteries, or up to 300 hours using the rechargeable battery option
Simple. Instant on/off, autosave, one-touch file access keeps you on task.
Linux, few years ago it got record to boot on 0.01 seconds. You wanted fast loading OS, (Software running on kernel mode or supervisor mode is the operating system). If you want bloated software system like Ubuntu or Windows XP, then you should ask such, not the fast booting operating system.
I would take Linux + Vi + Bash + SSH to get very small software system with Linus operating system.
Why do you want to have a computer that you have to boot from cold?
My MacBook wakes from sleep in a couple of seconds. A couple more to log in. It will stay in sleep for days on a fully charged battery.
When I do reboot, I'm pretty sure that MaxOS X comes up to usable in less than 60s (not that I have timed it) Of course I probably reboot less than once a week anyway.
Can you get either Windows or Linux to sleep when you close up your laptop? If so, how long does it take to "awaken" from sleep mode?
Can you configure either system to require a password on wake-up? That would add a measure of security. I'm pretty sure Windows can do that. I know that what Linux will do varies with the hardware and the Distro/Kernel version and available drivers.
It syncs with my PC via USB, so downloading my notes onto the main PC is a snap. The phone part is a bit crap, and I look like an idiot holding this brick up to my ear, but that aside I couldn't live without it, and it is ideal for that sort of very quick / brief notetaking that you describe.
Not possible. Emacs is not only your friend, it's your faithful slave.
I will never live for sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.
eeepc (701) boots in about 20 seconds. a laptop with slashtop boots in about 5 seconds I think (from there, you could use google's notepad).
Don't boot.
I have had a mac notebook (okay a couple different notebooks) for about 10 years for just that type of thing.
I don't boot, I just let it sleep all the time. It sleeps for days. When I need it, open, wake, login. I require login from wake but you could speed it up by not requiring the security, and then text edit.
OS X wakes from sleep, login, and start vi-ing in under 10 seconds on my current MacBook, the stop watch test just did 7 sec (closed, slept, then timed waking and continuing this post). And it is pretty reliable. The only thing that has ruined that reliability is sleeping virtualized servers in VmWare or Parallels, then sometimes it takes longer.
Get an old Jornada 540 Series off of eBay. They can be had really cheaply, boot in seconds, and sync up nicely with whatever flavor of Windows you have. If you don't like the tiny on-screen keyboard, they have attachments.
Why choose white shoes?
My Acer Aspire One boots to GUI in 14 seconds, the keyboards not bad either for a Netbook, it's even quicker if you just suspend rather than shutdown.
menuetos, fits on a floppy
www.menuetos.net
Call me a Luddite, but I carry a small, pocket sized Mead pad around and a small pen.
Behold: http://www.mead.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/product3_10051_10006_126671_-1_false_10051
And you can get it in a different color each time! :)
I suggest:
1) Use a smaller handheld device to take notes with. All manager of PDAs, Nintendo DS, iPhone and iPod touch can take notes in an instant.
2) If you're going to use a laptop, then leave it in suspend mode and don't power it off when you go mobile.
3) If you must power off the laptop off when mobile, then power it off in Hibernate mode.
Most laptops are hard drive based which means no matter what OS you choose you will be waiting a period of time for the OS to overcome the speed bottleneck of the hard drive.
On a macbook you can have OSX suspended all the time. Just open the laptop's lid and the OS will resume instantly. You don't even have to press a key to resume it. And of course, no need to boot it. Actually, the only time I get my macbook restarted is after software patches.
I really don't get why other laptops don't have this feature*, because it works great and it is such a pleasure to use it.
As a sidenote, is OS boot time really such an important thing? Lets look a the a mobile phone for example. Nobody cares how much it takes it to boot. When you have it on "standby" you just press a combination of buttons and your phone is ready to use. I still don't get why don't we have computers who have better suspend modes etc.
*they can suspend/hibernate when you close the lid, but never resume automatically after you open the lid.
Trolls are like broken clocks. They show the truth two times a day. The rest of the day they talk nonsense.
providing you get an old school distro, (Arch, Crux or Slackware) and build a tickless kernel with a Timer Frequency of 1000Hz & pre-empt. i have Slackware 12.1 booting very quickly and the response is quite snappy...
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Strewth! It's a long time since i saw one of those. I wonder if there's people around here who've never seen one...
http://splashtop.com/ 5 second to boot. by default, its on the hard drive, but i saw a guy boot it from usb flash. it is worth a look.
Last Friday I was using our reflectometer 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.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
I am typing this on my Acer Aspire One, on which I put Debian with X11 and ion3.
The whole system, stripped from things like crond, boots in roughly 20 seconds. It can do pretty much all I want and I use it too for some browsing and coding.
1) Just learn VI. You won't regret it
2) Use Nano
BeOS boots extremely fast (I seem to recall something like 5 to 10 seconds). And, of course, it comes with a standard text editor.
I'm not sure if you can get a copy any more, though.
-dZ.
Carol vs. Ghost
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
I think MS-DOS (or a variant) is the answer. It should boot almost instantly.
Even though you get the 8.3 filename limitation, you have DOS Edit or QBasic to edit text files.
for taking notes, nothing beats pen and paper
EPOC: Instant-on for years after first boot, best served in an E Ink reincarnation of the Psion (to be developed)...
Especially with a slimmed down kernel, it smokes anything else I've used.
However, does it really matter?
DOS will not have any of the power management features required to operate a modern laptop. The hit to your battery life would be SEVERE
Its not clear that battery life is relevant to the question. Original question did after all mention
"boot my laptop and edit a few lines of text, or jot down an idea or two"
I think even the worst possible power management should survive long enough to meet that task. If boot speed is the primary objective, then DOS should be just fine. The question did not say that the user wants to boot quickly and write a novel, after all.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
boot linux init=/usr/bin/tee /notes.txt
Done!
A notebook boots in 2 seconds. You just open it to a blank page, uncap your pen, and voila, the perfect text editor. Plus, you can draw figures without any special software.
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
This chap has how to hitch it up to Linux or Xbox and whatnot.
http://www.planetnz.com/palmheads/tandy.php
Ok, as much as I hate windows (only use it for gaming at non-wine-able stuff), you SHOULD be able to boot XP in about 30 seconds if you take all the crapware out. Unless you use a stripped down linux (command line only), you should still be able to get it to boot in less than a minute. Well, maybe not Vista...
A few years ago I followed:
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-lwl1/
over a long weekend. It took about 2.5 days off-and-on to bring it up. You get a hand-compiled linux install with busybox providing all of your tools. The only issue I had was that copied-over binaries worked better if you compiled them against uclibc as well. It was a fun project. One neat trick it taught me was to tar directly to the floppy device. The instructions can probably be adapted to USB media. Once I finished, I build vim and nano against uclibc and copied them over.
If I recall correctly, it was a 486 laptop and most of the boot time was the BIOS setting up. If you can adapt the process to a modern machine, it will do that for which you are asking.
-Adam
Computer Science is all about trying to find the right wrench to bang in the right screw. -T.Cumbo?
I still have my ancient Visor Platinum. It has a 'boot' time of 0. Perfect for jotting down a few words.
I think the people saying to use hibernation/sleep features are probably closest to right for most practical purposes now. I thought I'd add a historical side-note...
In the 1980's, MIT Lisp Machines were often used in demos for visitors from funding agencies. Probably mostly people from (D)ARPA. And things would often go wrong. Things had to reboot.
Now instruction times were a lot slower then, but you'd be surprised how little boot times have changed over the years. Seems like every time someone speeds up the hardware, they also slow down the speed of booting of both at least the operating system and maybe also the programs. So normal booting was a process of 30 seconds or a minute, as I recall. And that was inconvenient for these demos.
So someone worked out a way that you could do something called instaboot. You'd load up everything you needed and would save the image, kind of like going into standby mode on your computer. But it was intended to be restarted multiple times. When you started, it would just pull in the pages that you needed first to let you run, pulling in other things you needed on demand.
You could save it in whatever state you wanted, for example with the editor already loaded and started. Even with files loaded ito editor buffers if you wanted, though that obviously ran the risk that if you later edited them on two subsequent occasions, you might get a conflict. But that was up to you. Nothing kept you from trying.
The effect was startling. You could reboot the machine and be up and running in about a second, maybe two. The only evidence was that the screen would change and would kind of bounce (some sort of sync pulse or degaussing thing or something, I never quite knew what that was).
So demos were always loaded and saved, then booted into. When the demo went bad, you just hit reboot. It was so fast, people would notice something had happened but often wouldn't know what. "Just garbage collecting," we would say. Well, it was sort of true. Rebooting is a particularly efficient way to garbage collect.
For some reason, that feature was not carried forward into later models of the Lisp Machine. It was only there on the CADR at MIT (and perhaps the LM-2 and the TI Explorer and LMI Lambda, I'm not sure, since I never used those, though they were repackaged variants of the same thing). It didn't go into the Symbolics 3600 nor later series machines.
Kent M Pitman
Philosopher, Technologist, Writer
Just dont boot a GUI with *nix.
PicoBSD
FreeDOS
VsTA
QNX
www.osnews.com
---- Booth was a patriot ----
http://www.embeddedarm.com/products/board-detail.php?product=TS-7370
When Norton was still awesome, they came out with Norton Textra Writer.
A Dos-based editor which could check grammer and spelling.
For my money, nothing beats the Hipster PDA.
On an emate300.
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
Instant on! Doesn't get faster than that. OK, so loading a text editor takes 5 minutes, but you asked about boot time.
C= 4 life!
*If* it works. It still beats me that there are so many relatively new computers that don't want to hibernate. I think selling a computer that does not hibernate or suspends to RAM out of the box is criminal.
No USB drive compatibility, but instant on.
The love of newspaper field reporters for decades:
http://oldcomputers.net/trs100.html
Not bad for 1983.
__ Someday, but not this morning, I'll finally learn to use the preview button.
My XP laptop (Toshiba Satellite, 1gig ram) boots in less than 45 seconds
It recovers from hibernate in about 8 seconds
Not sure what the guy who wrote the article description at top is running XP on, but 4 minutes seems ridiculous. Even the slow-ass machines where I work boot XP in less than 2 minutes.
I'd also go with hibernate or use cell phone, b/c it sounds like he's using an underpowered computer
Tons of Linux guys on here have (probably better) suggestions, but if you want to stick w/ XP, hibernate
Thank you Dave Raggett
"Me, I just write shit on my hand with a sharpie."
I do the same, just on my forehead.
It has obviously made me more efficient, as requests for my IT assistance has dropped markedly.
In post Patriot Act America, the library books scan you.
From the top of my head:
- (X)Ubuntu with a default XFCE enviroment. Designed for very old computers and people who hate the Gnome/KDE slowpoking.
- Haiku OS. OSS BeOS variant. Lightning fast, designed with the GUI in mind. Sub-10-seconds booting is rumored.
- The Syllable 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.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
I hear Ubuntu boots faster out of hibernation.
This is false (for me at least--old Sony Vaio SZ with 2GB of RAM). My laptop takes a longer time to unhibernate than it does to reboot with Ubuntu. XP unhibernates quickly. Additionally, with some older kernels, Ubuntu took 4 minutes to hibernate. (It's better with the newer kernels.) XP takes a lot less than that. But at least all my apps keep their state.
There's this amazing device combo called pen-and-paper that is astonishingly good for jotting down a quick note. Zero boot time, no batteries, very light, and costs about $3.
The search capabilities are pretty primitive, but examples have been shown to be still accessible after nearly 2000 years!
Not every problem requires a high tech solution.
If all he wants is text editing. I see no problem with loading up vim or emacs on DOS. he can kick it off in autoexec.bat if he wants.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
I know the feeling of wanting to urgently write something down. Thats why I always have a pen and a pad as well as my laptop in my backpack with me. I just find a pen and a pad so much more convenient if you want to do more than just write a quick note, like draw a diagram or the likes =)
I second the Blackberry idea. I am constantly adding tasks or notes in to my Blackberry, or adding stuff to the calendar. Eventually when I get back to my laptop or desktop my edits are there waiting for me.
I really don't have anything bad to say about DS Organize, a homebrew app. As a bonus, it includes a somewhat old-school web browser - but it's much faster than Opera DS. Have fun getting your hands on a homebrew cartridge these days though. Grr. And when you find a seller, do your homework first. R4 is a good cartridge. I and everyone I know has been very happy with it.
[|]
"What is the fastest booting operating system out there that is still sufficient for editing text?"
certainly: Puppy Linux.
7 seconds and you are ready
is to load Damn Small Linux onto a USB flash drive and boot from there. Then you've got a full desktop to actually do a few things with and you don't have to spend a bunch of time "compiling" other stuff; unless of course that's your hobby.
Different application, but check into ltsp.org as they made significant boot time reductions for the client machines. If you're doing a project to compress the next Windows or Ubuntu boot code then look there for what they did as a good proxy.
XP loads in roughly 4 minutes to usable
Well, mine boots in one minute, and that's including the 25 seconds the RAID controller spends looking for drives (before I installed it, it "booted to desktop" in exactly 26 seconds - I timed it). Add about 3 seconds to start something like Notepad / Textpad (or 6 seconds to start a real word processor) and you should be up and running in 30-90 seconds. Not lightning fast, and slightly slower than a "lightweight" Linux system, but a long way from "4 minutes".
But you can be up and running in much less than that simply by using sleep / hibernate, instead of actually loading the full OS.
Or get a modern PDA / cell phone. You can take photos of anything that's already written down or you can use the sound recorder to take voice notes (this is assuming you don't like typing on a PDA / cell phone keyboard). Then just transfer everything to your PC via Wi-Fi or Bluetooth or whatever.
For the true "pen & paper" feel, get a digital pen (Flash-heavy site). You'll still need to find something (or someone) to write on, though.
My Nokia N800 is running 24/7, with a sketchpad just like 3 seconds away. I can either draw my notes, or flip open my bluetooth keyboard and type up some notes.
:(){
I think Damn Small Linux is perfect for this. It's very fast to boot on most machines, can easily be carried around on a CD or USB pendrive, it has a GUI that's reasonably easy to use though minimal, it has Nano and Beaver for text editing, and can be extended easily thanks to MyDSL. It's also possible to install it to HD. As long as you're comfortable mounting devices from the command line, it should be a good choice.
Boots straight to a Word Processor :D
Agreed. My PC uses only three watts when running in suspend-to-disk mode (equal to the amount it uses when powered off), and boots instantly when I wake it up.
Need an automatic screenshot taker? Try here.
Whenever I run Vista my computer gets a fast boot to the main screen.
In fact, one time I kicked my monitor clear across the room, and I am generally a very calm person.
Slashdotter, ID #101. UIDs are in binary, right?
When I want to write NOW NOW NOW, I reach for my Alphasmart. 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."
In about 10 days you probably won't be able to power it up. See http://forum.eeeuser.com/viewtopic.php?pid=317729#p317729 .
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.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
Loads pretty fast and you still have GUI for other things.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Macintosh laptops running OS X will wake from sleep and be ready to use before you get the lid open. Just leave your favorite text editor or word processor open when you put it to sleep so it is available in zero seconds.
I don't know about FAT32 support but this suggestion isn't so much for the OP as for others who might be interested.
This is not a new feature of Macintoshes--I have used Apple laptops since the mid 1990s and it has always been this way. And they will sleep for nearly a week before draining the battery, at which time they store everything to disk and then shut down.
PalmOS. Instantly on, grab the stylus and write. Perfect fit for you.
I was going to give that answer, but you beat me to it. It must be as obvious as I thought it was. I would like to add to this that the question, as formulated, is probably wrong. The questioner asked for an OS with text-editing capability and nothing more. But when he would actually start to use such a contraption, he'd quickly find out that it's kind of bothersome not to be able to browse the web, for example. As usual, at least in my experience, people almost never realise or know what they want, which makes them ask the wrong questions. The nice thing about sleep-to-disk is that it works on pretty much any modern OS so the asker can do whatever he's doing now, so we can recommend it even though we don't know what he actually wants.
Moblin claims a boot time of 5 seconds - in that time a fully usable UI environment is loaded. http://moblin.org/netbooks-and-nettops I have recently seen a movie as a 'proof' on a conference but I cannot find it on youtube or similar.
I'm not familiar with the current small/fast more obscure distros, so my first thought was
"I wonder how fast a really old OS would run on new hardware." Assuming it could run on the new hardware, of course.
Remember the "Turbo" button? Whoa. Slow down, buddy.
whoever posted this is a retard. 3 minutes to boot windows?
Sounds like he's got every possible piece of crapware, antivirus, 25 things in his system-tray and every background service possible.
The kind of guy who, when you go to use something on his computer, the drive clicks for 15 seconds.
So much bullshit installed that he has to boot another OS to edit text. ROFL.
My XP install never takes more than 20 seconds to boot. nLite helps here.
I'm surprised no one has mentioned coreboot (formerly LinuxBIOS). I seem to recall three second boot times.
http://www.coreboot.org
apart from the obvious insult of course.
it also beats me why someone would need to fire up another operating system to take notes. NOTES ffs.
Read radical news here
A statically linked Linux system with no USB etc can boot in 3 or so seconds to a command line, even on a 100MHz CPU.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Pencil & paper.
Boot time appears almost instantaneous.
Very handy for jotting down an idea or two.
Battery doesn't run out.
I keep a pencil+paper on the door of my fridge, so it's always easy to find.
For storage, I use "back pocket of jeans" until I can upload it somewhere permanent.
Haven't tried it, but I bet it boots quite quickly.
Are you saying that you were able to alter the boot time by putting the machine in motion?
That's quite a kick you got there.
"We are Microsoft. You shall be assimilated. Competition is futile."
Okay, listen, I'm as much a techhead as the next guy, and far more than most (check out my Slashdot user ID), but the right tool for this job seems to be pen and paper. I carry around a small notebook with me almost everywhere I go, and it's not the electronic variety. Actual dead-tree paper. I jot stuff down throughout the day, enroute to work at a stop light, during lunch, at the movies, whatever. I can also write things down to give to people. It never needs an electrical outlet or batteries, and doesn't even need to be solar-powered, and you don't look like a tool at a coffeeshop.
If this is simply too low-tech for your lifestyle, then might I suggest you get a smartphone. You most likely carry this with you at all times, and you can easily take notes on them. Some even have qwerty keyboards. There's a very nice looking one coming out on the Sprint network next month called the HTC Touch Pro. And if you want a slim no-keyboard model, the HTC Diamond is out in a week or so. Very high-resolution screen (VGA, which is, I think 50% better than that of the iPhone). You will almost certainly be able to put Google's Android on both of these phones. Personally, I'm waiting for the HTC Touch HD, with an 800x480 screen. :)
How about DOS?
How is that fast? You still gotta boot Windows so you can open a DOS-box, right? ;-)
BeOS is a reasonably featured OS, and it boots like lightning if it's installed on the disk (takes a few seconds if you're booting from something else, but still faster than most Linux desktops I've seen).
Some are up to 32GB now.
Point 1: Sleep and wake actually works on MacOS/X
My MacBook hangs every few dozen or so cycles. It's also rather ponderous.
Sleep/wake works a lot better on the OLPC or the EEE PC
I have been playing around with this very minimalist distro the past few days. I can get it to go from completly shut down to a graphical login in about 35 seconds. This includes grub and everything. Getting it to boot into a text-only login will probably take less time, but I haven't benchmarked it yet.
MS-DOS boots from USB drive in about 1 second (after BIOS). Type EDIT and away you go.
But if you just want to jot something down, why not use an iPhone, Palm Pilot, or blackberry and email it to yourself?
Exactly right, and it cuts out the BIOS startup as well! The text editor is already open on the document you were just working on.
just take notes on a phone such as a BlackBerry. If you are connected to a BES, the notes will wireless sync in real time with the notes in your Outlook.
My slackware 12.1 (with kernel 2.6.26 though) boots in 30 seconds, from Loading Linux to the login prompt.
Then I'd go emacs -nw, but since you ruled it out, try the other already suggested simple editors
(nano seems a good choice).
Windows XP 4 minutes until a uasable boot? WTF, my old Dell D800 running XP SP3 can get to a usable desktop in 60 seconds or less, and yes I have about 50 applications installed. The trick is to keep your start-up streamlined, and always keep malware off your system.
LinuxBIOS/Coreboot will get a system up in 3 seconds or less.
But requires a motherboard compatible with coreboot. Which do you recommend buying?
I keep my MacBook Air in a manilla folder and use the pen in my pocket to write directly on it. Time to boot: zero.
Say hello to my little sig.
Use DOS.
If you need fancy text editing, use WordPerfect 7.
You can even find shortkey masks for standard keyboards, I still remember shift-7 prints.
Either way, Linux's boot-to-edit cannot come close to the speed of DOS. Especially with himem and emm386 disabled.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
So hypothetical analogy guy is in one city, and complains that he must spend his nights in a city an hour away because his company is paying for his hotel and they will only pay for a Motel 6, which is in the city an hour away, and asking how to speed up the trip. You could either answer his question, or let him know about the Motel 6 a minute away that he missed..
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Oh, you wanted something that runs on x86? Well, then you should have said so. Seriously, though, I've still got my old Palm III, which is perfect for taking notes, and it syncs with just about everything. A quick check of Ebay shows a "Palm III xe PDA" for $20, and a "Palm Pilot 3Com PDA Organizer - Palm III" for $15.
Nothing for 6-digit uids?
... you velcro a small paper pad and pen to your laptop. Seriously.
QNX can be boot in about a second and has both VI and Emacs. You can have EMACS preloaded as part of the boot and it won't add much time.
I'm pretty sure there is a config switch for it too, but ALT+L works for me.
My Debian install pretty much boots to my Openbox GUI in about 15-20 seconds.
The ingredients are as follows:
1. Custom kernel, with all fancy shmancy that I don't need tossed out. And since I don't chance processors everyday, no initrd.
2. use init-NG instead of the old init.
3. Remove all processes from startup that you don't really need. Under debian I prefer sysv-rc-conf for that.
4. use a sleek window manager instead of KDE. In my case, as I said, Openbox.
5. Use mingetty instead of getty. Set it up in the inittab so that the mingetty on TTY2 logs your user in automagically.
6. Don't use KDM/GDM/whatever. Simply add a few lines in your .profile that check if current TTY is TTY2, and run a startx
7. ?????
8. Porfit!
9. Install spellchecker.
On my computer, it's 20 seconds from power on to Notepad.
It's that easy. Boot time -- 0 seconds.
For the situation you describe, I wouldn't recommend an operating system so much as the laptop being the wrong tool for the job.
I've been using the Alphasmart 3000 (www.alphasmart.com)for quite a few years now, and it's great for doing the things you describe. Starts up within a second or two, and you can be editing text within that time. Incredible battery life, and you can use the keyboard emulator cable to download the ASCII text to any word processing software to make things look pretty later.
For a relatively low price (few hundred dollars), I strongly suggest you check it out. I've used mine on business travel, to take notes at the job, and the kids love using it for typing up reports for school too.
The FASTEST OS I have seen is BeOS. It boots to a GUI in under 15 seconds on a Pentium II @ 200 MHz with MMX. Too bad it is no longer supported.
I never turn my MacBook Pro off. It's ready to rock in about one second. I assume you can do the same with Linux, FreeBSD or even Windows. Why would you want to turn off a modern computer?
Beauty is in the beholder of the eye.
http://www.freedos.org/cgi-bin/lsm.cgi?mode=dir&dir=edit
direct link for a smattering of editors for it...
should be quick - setup the autoexec.bat to start the editor of choice if want even faster...
Who is general failure, and why is he reading my hard drive?
Small, fast, and free.
Who needs a Large Hadron Collider? All we need is two PC running XP at opposite ends of a room. In a short time they will be booted to the speed of light and we can study the subatomic particles that emerge.
And we thought MS was spending billions on an operating system, when in reality they were building a particle accelerator. Tricky.
Waaaay back in the day, I had a 180Mhz power mac running BeOS which would take 12-15 seconds to go from completely powered off to fully usable GUI.
My PC BIOS these days takes longer than that.
He just accelerated it so it's just logical that it would boot faster.
"Three eyes are better than one" -- Lieutenant Columbo
pcdos on a recent/fast machine. It gets me to a prompt in 10 seconds if I remove the usb,cdrom etc drivers. simple dos editor from there.
"Computers are a lot like Air Conditioners" "They both work great until you start opening Windows"
Brilliant for this sort of thing. Boots in 6 seconds from suspend. Cheap as chips.
(also brilliant for many other things).
LiveScribe boots up in 3 seconds. Records audio and has the best UI in the world for writing -- a pen.
Between it and my crackberry, I don't need to carry around a laptop any more.
You're looking for a PDA. Too bad no one really makes them anymore. The creators behind the Palm Pilot expressly designed the thing to compete with a pen-and-paper rather than the other digital organizers that were available at the time.
I have a work-provided blackberry, but I still find myself doing everything (except for checking email or using google maps) on my Palm TX.
I use tejpwriter to edit documents on SD cards, it's one of the few things that can grapple with large documents. With an portable IR or bluetooth keyboard you can actually do some serious editing with it, then sync up with your real computer later.
Also useful utilities such as PalmPDF allow me to proofread and refer to finished documents and presentations for research / rehearsals. All my other information comes in through SunRise + Plucker. It also comes with a stripped-down rudimentary MS-Office compatible Documents thingy, but I haven't found it very useful beyond the spreadsheet application.
For very quick notes I just use the "notes" scribblepad thing, and then transcribe it into the correct application later.
I wish they succeeded in porting Palm OS to Linux. Supposedly the Nokia N810 tablet has a working Palm Garnet VM that reportedly works pretty well.
http://www.access-company.com/products/gvm/
Seems like the best option so far for a "modern" PDA, though it wasn't expressly designed as one.
Or, as ASUS call it "Express Gate"
Comes with all their new motherboards, and on the EEEBox, too.
5 seconds to a screen.
Editor in about 2 -3 more seconds.
Just coming out on their notebooks too..
http://www.splashtop.com/
For such fast boots to a workable enviroment, Splashtop would seem ideal
http://www.splashtop.com/
Several of the Asus motherboards come with it. I'm sure it must be possible to modify it, but I haven't tried it let ... I'd like them to release one with integrated onboard Intel graphics.
Don't people comment when they see "shit" written on your hand?
0 seconds. It runs a busybox/Maemo-based Linux.
My N800 is "on" almost all the time and nearby. It easily goes 2+ days between charges if you're just using it for text editing, lite browsing, email, and RSS feeds.
If I'm playing music, and Skyping, and using the GPS and uploading vacation pictures with it, the battery lasts about 5 hours of heavy use. Generally, when I'm doing all these things, I'm in a hotel with power. Let's be honest here, uploading photos over a 3G connection (bluetooth tethered to my cheap cell phone) is stupid.
If you do nothing but leave it on, then there's 9 days of standby battery.
OR you could put your laptop into standby for about 3 sec boots or hibernate for 5 sec boots. This works for almost any OS.
Still the fasters thing to have is pen and some paper/small paper based notebook! Boot up within less than a second. Just keep it around. If keeping a laptop around is easier than a paper/pen, then attach the pen and paper to the notebook.
It never shuts down.
I have a surprisingly sleek Cambridge Z88 notepad from 1988 that I still use occasionally. It has an absolutely silent rubber keyboard with sculpted keys and a rather decent text editor built in. Total time to resume is around half a second and it runs 20 hours on 4 AA batteries.
My dell 630 laptop with XP returns from hibernation in less than 10 secs and boots up (disk activity light is mostly off) in less than 45 secs. Hibernation works well on this system. If the system is in standby (small amount of power consumption) then is ready almost instantly, main delay in this case is the wireless connecting which for word processing shouldn't be necessary.
For crying out loud if you geeks haven't mentioned MinuetOS then all is absolutely lost.
You have an excellent point. I have all the gadgets - smartphone, crackberry, laptop, multiple desktops and multiple servers ... yet, I use the GTD-PocketMod (folded paper) http://www.pocketmod.com/ and pencil more than any other solution for note taking. PocketMod was just the start of the idea - I converted that into a multi-tabbed XLS with a summary tab that can be printed and folded into pocketmod format.
I used to call jott or my answering machine for longer/complex notes.
available on newer Dell Latitudes. I'm not sure USB drivers are included, though.
Here's a review
This is not my opinion. Actually, it's not even an opinion. And I'm nowhere to be seen near it
Not a tablet PC. A tablet, like a paper one. Keep one with you. Problem solved. If the thought is so short that a long boot time makes it inconvenient to jot down, then it will only take a second to type it up when you get in front of a comp.
====
Crudely Drawn Games
xo laptop
http://picasaweb.google.com/sbassi/Fosiles#5241617089796398514
DNA in your Linux: DNALinux
Replying to clear moderation; I swear I meant to hit underrated.
Now you only need a decent text editor. I guess vim would do.
Sorry, couldn't resist.
"We've discovered... the anti-cluon."
DRM: Terminator crops for your mind!
ne might be a nice option for what he is looking for, it uses the same default shortcuts as all the "usual" crap like notepad, EDIT etc. regarding the OS there have been some solid recommendations (xubuntu, customized debian with fluxbox, busybox is a bit far fetched in my opinion), however if you really want to tinker with it and optimize your boot time, but still maintain a fully operational OS, try gentoo.
I recently plugged an old 100mb hard drive I pulled out of a drawer into my system. I didn't know what was on it. Turned out to be a boot drive with Dos 6.0 and Windows 3.1 on it. On a Celeron 2.66 ghz the GUI was loaded and usable 5 seconds most of which was BIOS initilization. It was staggeringly fast, just shows how much junk they've added to modern versions.
Windows 3.1 did have wordpad and it worked fine for text. Might have problem getting printer drivers for newer printers though :)
Call me a mac zealot, but my MACbook sleeps immediately after closing the lid, can stay like this for more than 2 days, and comes back in less that 20 seconds, depending on what you run (I usually have thunderbird, firefox, terminals, synergy, and 5+ more things open and it is 15-20 seconds)....
Yeah .... a Windows laptop takes 2+ minutes to come back with XP, and a Vista laptop 5+ minutes to boot (new Compaq, NOTHING installed other than the standard crap) .... yeye ... you can get a faster one .... etc ....
Anyways ,... I am sure a Macbook air with very few things running can come back in less than 10 seconds ....
Just my take on it ... I love any flavour of unix ......... especially if it runs on something with an apple logo and starts with an "i" .....
Yeah ... my iphone is faster too than my crap S60 nokia !!!
And when Apple figures out that loud noise is everyone clamouring for them to make their bluetooth iPhone work with their bluetooth keyboard, it'll be an amazing note taking tool.
Until then, ignoring the staggeringly obvious, it's a pain in the ass to write more than a few sentences.
Don't get me wrong, I own one, I love it and I recommend it to people despite its many flaws because I think, even with them, it's still an amazing tool... But there are a few staggeringly, achingly obvious things they've totally failed to put in there. Copy and paste is one of them, bluetooth keyboard support on a bluetooth enabled device is another.
Carry a pen and small notepad.
An editor would be a great addition to GRUB. I've used GRUB's "cat" command before to take a quick look at some text files. Being able to edit them would be a pretty simple additional command I would think, and it doesn't really need to "boot" at all.
If suspending is not your solution, try ReactOS. Last time I checked it was booting so fast. But it is not that mature of an OS.
Persian Project Management Software as a Service
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
You can get USB aswell:
http://www.amigau.com/c-amiga/hardware.htm
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
minimum profit rules!
http://triptico.com/software/mp.html
Never liked vi or emacs but needed a console editor. nano or pico whatever you want to call it was always a little assbackwards.
mp curses is easy to use and has powerful search and replace features.
syntax highlihting.
multiple docs.
the list continues
combine that with a embedded linux system and you got what you need.
If I had put as much time into learning vi or emacs as some other people out there I would badmouth all the other editors too;-)
Palm OS.
Both feel like an eternity if there isn't a pen and paper around.
You carry around a bag with a laptop and it has never occurred to you to put said pen and paper in one of the zipper sections?
Also, still in the "Does it necessarily have to be Linux ?" category, PDAs are another possibility too.
I have used several PalmOS based machines during my studies and even still now.
Turns on in less than a second, has hardware button that can be bound to jump straight into some text editing app (the default "Notes" app, or anything else can do the job to. Although "Office"-compatible editors like Documents-to-Go seem slower to start).
Also, PDA have lots of foldable keyboard solutions if you don't like stylus scribing (specially on older machine where you have to learn using another specialized character set) or if you don't like Palm Treo / Black Berry -like thumb keyboard.
Stowaway/Think outside/iGo used to produce nice keyboards, which unfolded into the same size are a desktop keyboard, but folded into a shape not that much more bigger than the PDA it self. Used to be connected to the serial port of the PDA, now the modern keyboards communicates using Bluetooth or IrDA.
Instant desktop, only a couple of seconds between your pocket and deployed on any approximatively flat surface.
I would recommend getting whatever PDA has a good response time (test first !) and good sync to your desktop (Palms are widely supported on most platforms. WinCE seems too. But what's the iPhone support under Linux ?) combined with a foldable Bluetooth keyboard from iGo, preferably a 5-rows one (1 number row and 3 rows of letter with a space bar, like your desktop), not a 4-rows one (only 3 rows of letter and a space bar, number are obtain using some shift-key and the first row of letters).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
A ROMed Linux. lol. There are a couple tablet PCs out there that will ROM boot linux. Basically it is just about instant on.
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson
+1 for vim +2 freebsd
Its not that bloody hard, what its like 5 or 6 keys/commands you need to learn to get started.
Thats less than most fps(etc) these days
and it's name is DOS.
and the command to use is EDIT.
hell, it saves in fat32, and as .txt files.
according to the request, this OS has to give him the absolute fastest boot time with what he wants to do.
hell, he can even get it for free from freedos.org
I thought about offering advice.
Why is your computer off in the first place?
If you want a light fast system then build it with slackware or, if you don't mind more memory you might build a gentoo system.
In eithercase build only the essentials into the kernel and turn off all of the nonessential services. My suggestion, if you want to share the laptop with a "full featured" os is to wither create two root partitions one fast one full and then stock the fast one with only the minimal amounts then share /home.
Or alternately mess with the kernel flags and add startup scripts to kick it into a no-services profile. This is one area where gentoo is nice in that you can set a bootlevel that turns off everything logging, services, etc.
The disadvantage of the scripted form is the messiness with linking the two while the separate disks makes for a "cleaner" partition, and less likelyhood that booting into a full or minimal system will screw with essential /etc files.
Get a cell phone with a text edit capability. I have a Windows Mobile phone (useful but annoying); with it, I can open an app and leave it open in the background.
You mentioned that you don't want to wait too long for a computer to boot up to to jot down your idea. My recommendation would be to use what's worked for hundreds of years, a pen and paper - pens are fairly nondescript and a nice moleskine along with a decent fountain pen (you can get a decent one for $30-50 that should last as long as you take care of it) makes writing a sheer pleasure.
Not sure if this would apply, but I can have my Palm TX booted and open a Word document for editing in under 6 seconds. If you store your documents on an SD card, you can pop that in the Palm, or into a USB adapter to edit on your computer.
If you system takes 4 minutes to boot to XP, you've f'ed up your computer somehow.
I wonder if remastering a Knoppix/Ubuntu/Etc live CD would be the way to go. Remove X and Gnome, networking, sound, etc and just bring up a bash shell with the basic filesystem drivers and vim/emacs/nano. Put it on a USB drive for portability as well.
Feh, in my day if thou didn't have quill and ink at thy ready, one was forced to carve inspiration literally into the dermis. Why, I knew several quite prodigious gentlemen who, when inspiration struck, used up two or three young servants over the course of a week! And erasing proved especially messy.
Try Syllable it's a GUI OS, and has been around for a little while.
http://web.syllable.org/pages/index.html
I guess there's not much posted yet, but Arjan and Auke presented at the Linux Plumbers Conference this past week and demo'd a not massively modified linux booting to fully usable (all the way to X even) in 5 seconds. Discussions and hacking at the conference apparently trimmed an additional second or two off that. There was a lot of excitement, so I'd expect to see their mods making it upstream into the kernel, distros and X.
A clean install of XP will give you notepad etc. and will boot in 15 seconds or so on a pc that's not older then 4 years or so.
Either any embedded linux or winmobile PDA will do the trick, dude. Try one with the full qwerty keyboard like HTC Tytn. Always with you, always good for notes and if you dont want to write just click the voice recorder or take a picture of the sketch u just drew on the whiteboard.
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.slashdot.org Errors found while checking this document as HTML5!
can still access fat32 formatted USB drives...
Thing,
If you have a PDA/phone that can access a fat32 usb drive then please let me know, cause that would be awesome.
Not all life is cyber. Extra Income
An iPod touch or iPhone or MacBook all wake from sleep instantly and don't need to be shutdown. So if you need a full PC then get a MacBook and you can just open it. By the time the lid is open it is ready for you to work. On the iPod touch or iPhone there is a built-in Notes app and Mail app or you can install SSH or WordPress. Again they are available instantly as soon as you want to use them.
My 2004 LG cell phone has a note taking program built-in. Sure, it isn't a text editor or anything but from time to time I do write a few words or a number in there if I have to.
Can't really answer the question, as emacs is the most friendly editor out there. VI isn't too shabby as well. How can you expect to be taken seriously after taking a rude swipe at the two most popular (and for good reason) editors out there?
tell you that is the future - and I bet hell and heaven that M$ works on their version like mad.
imagine a boss who would not like to have his computer up and running immediately after flipping the power switch!
if M$ can not do that they have lost the game!
It cold boots in under a second.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_SX-64
Can't we just go back to pickin on Windows users? :-)
Quack, quack.
Indeed.
Yep, when I pick up my Palm Treo it is usable in about 1 second. If you REALLY need something super uberquick so you don't forget your brilliant stroke of genius, you probably don't need everything that a laptop can do. You can prbably get a decent Treo 650 or something else with a qwerty keyboard for under $75, OS included. Otherwise, I'd say run any minimalistic linux distro with any one of dozens of text editors. If that's all you need or want, you have zillions of choices that will all function exactly as you require. Heck, even a fully-loaded Linux Mint setup boots pretty quick on my mediocre laptop.
This is a hacked account, for which the owner can not be held responsible.
In my case, I use a T-Mobile MDA, which has a slide-out keyboard. I've also been looking at the Wing, which is basically the next version of the MDA.
It won't access your USB sticks though. However, if the file in question is just a to-do list, you can keep that on the PDA anyway. YMMV
Please mod this post only if you think others should/n't read this. I have enough ego^H^H^Hkarma. Thanks!
Macbook with OS X cold boots in 25 seconds. Put it in sleep mode (battery decreases with 16%/day) and boot in 2-3 seconds
See Oberon or the newer Bluebottle/A2 for booting with USB sticks:
http://www.ocp.inf.ethz.ch/
You can boot the OS natively, or if needed start it as applications on Windows or Linux/MacOS/Unix (x86).
...you always have Puppy Linux,a small, fast and fully functional distribution. With a customized kernel, I was able to get a boot up time of around 30 seconds on a 900 MHz Celeron processor, 512 mb RAM. Even with the default kernel, on my machine it takes around 38 seconds.
I'm surprised no one's mentioned the Tandy 100. There is still a lot of support out there, such as Club100, etc.
Someone should really make a new one with the same keyboard, maybe a better screen and WiFi that still runs on AA's.
There's the alphasmart, which is getting there, and runs PalmOS.
Cool! Amazing Toys.
Try Syllabe : http://web.syllable.org/pages/index.html
It boots almost instantaneously.
{{.sig}}
I use an iPod Touch for that. If I need the notes on a PC I email them to myself.
Quite a handy device for Todo, notes, etc on the go.
I always carry my c1000 or my c3200. When I need to write something down to imagepad or write into text file, I have those 2 softwares loaded to memory and ready to write. Also, simple edit, another software, does highlights for javascripts, java, python, perl, C, C++, HTML, Plain text. I just whip it out of my pocket, and press the power button and its on right away before your 1 second is up. It runs linux and I have to admit, it's under suspend but I have left it in suspend mode for 2 weeks without it needing a recharge and is fully charged after I look at it after those 2 weeks have gone by.
I'm sure Chuck Norris can...
Have you considered this? small (less than 100M) and fast (both in execution and in booting - it boots in about less than 10 secs from GRUB menu to X desktop) - and it's a full-fledged Linux desktop environment with much much more than just a text editor (of course, text editor is included).
Furthermore, you don't have to erase your existing OS - you can install it on top of Windows or any other Linux you have. (I have it running on top of UbuntuStudio - in fact, I use it everyday except when I need the studio).
Get it from http://puppylinux.com/
With an iPhone or a BlackBerry or some such, you can write a note and e-mail it to yourself, pick it up on your big machine later. Almost nothing to carry around.
nuff said.
Mach Boot Linux starts in as little as 10 seconds.
It's really sad, that nano still seems to be the gold standard of usable linux textmode text editors. Why the -w option is not default is beyond me, and it completely lacks syntax highlighting. Look for a program called "minimum profit" or mp. While the x version is a question of taste, the text version absolutely rocks! Here is a feature list:
# Fully scriptable using a C-like scripting language.
# Unlimited undo levels.
# Complete Unicode support.
# Multiple files can be edited at the same time and blocks copied and pasted among them.
# Syntax highlighting for many popular languages / file formats: C, C++, Perl, Shell Scripts, Ruby, Php, Python, HTML...
# Creative use of tags: tags created by the external utility ctags are used to move instantaneously to functions or variables inside your current source tree. Tags are visually highlighted (underlined), and symbol completion can be triggered to avoid typing your own function names over and over.
# Intelligent help system: pressing F1 over any word of a text being edited triggers the underlying system help (calling man when editing C or Shell files, perldoc with Perl, ri on Ruby, winhelp on MS Windows...).
# Understandable interface: drop-down menus, reasonable default key bindings.
# Configurable keys, menus and colors.
# Text templates can be easily defined / accessed.
# Multiplatform: Console/curses, KDE4, GTK+, MS Windows.
# Automatic indentation, word wrapping, internal grep, learning / repeating functions.
# Spellchecking support (via the ispell package).
# Multilingual.
# Password-protected, encrypted text files (using the ARCFOUR algorithm).
use XP or Vista in combination with sleepmode, or hybernation..
on my labtop that takes about 5 sec And gives me Word a powerfull text editor, but if you prefer you might use notepad as wel.
I know you're out there. I can feel you now. I know that you're afraid. You're afraid of us. You're afraid of change.
Ok, lots of people already pointed out the obvious: Sleep mode. For the record: I use a Mac, and it is back up and usable before I'm done opening the lid.
I'd like to point out something even more obvious: Pen & Paper.
Seriously. I'm a techie as much as anyone here, but at work, which is the place where I most often have to take small notes, quickly, and have them handy for reference, I carry a stack of blank index cards and a pen with me. By my estimate it will be 10 more years before something electronic beats that.
If you absolutely need it digital, throw them on a scanner.
If you really, really need them in text format, it isn't that much additional work to just copy them down in a text editor whenever startup time isn't the crucial factor.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
My system can load usably in less then 20 seconds from hibernation. This includes any open applications at the time of hibernation. So for example if there is a text file you're working with, just leave it open prior to hibernation, and there it is when you come back into the system.
computers in general are not good at this because at the very least they have to go through the post cycle which takes upwards of 5 seconds. That means that the absolute fastest you're going to get an OS to load is something like 6-7 seconds from pressing on... and you'd probably be dealing with DOS if it loaded entirely in 1 to 2 seconds after post.
I burn a couple more seconds, but get a modern OS for my trouble. If you aren't willing wait 20 seconds, then a PC solution here is probably not what you're looking for... you might consider a pocketPC with a thumb pad or hand writing recognition. When it comes to "let me take a note now"... you still can't beat pen and paper... but PPCs are pretty handy.
Get out of the stone ages. Who boots their machine anymore?????
My Macbook sleeps flawlessly and it is "booted" within the time it takes me to open the LCD. My Thinkpad running Ubuntu is "almost" as fast and almost as reliable "booted" most of the time a few seconds after the LCD is opened.
With modern laptop technology the concept of turning off a machine is archaic!
Additionally if one is not around a laptop or fullsize computer there is this really new and fun technology called the smartphone. Within a few seconds you can pull it out of you pocket and open up the "notes editor" on it. My Blackbery also does not need to be booted neat eh?
In case your stone tablet carving computer can't surf web pages fast enough a blackberry is a type of communication device sort of like the startrek communicator or iphone just much more capable than both.
Whats wrong with DOS it can boot up in under 20 seconds and get you into edit?
Solid State Hard Drives make a huge difference.
XP load times cut down to 30 seconds vs 4 minutes. I've done away with sleep and hibernate.
I agree however with other posters, it seems like you'd do better to get an Iphone, Ipod Touch, Blackberry or any of the other zillion handheld devices.
Still can't break a zero score on your posts even after subscribing, I see. *That* takes talent.
You're after the wrong target, sir. If you want to have your computer off, but available quickly, you should look to get suspension work right. Suspend to RAM is as quickly as 1 to 2 seconds in each direction (on -> off or off -> on). So, before you could take a full breath, the computer is fully booted, with all needed apps running and ready to take your notes.
The drawback is, on commodity PCs, suspend to RAM rarely works to full satisfaction. State of the art are Macintoshes; Linux and friends have still to catch up in this area.
if you run grub or lilo, you could specify a very stripped down kernel with no support for anything optional for a quick boot, but with a login to negotiate, i'd look to see if any of the dos variants are usb qualified.
4 minutes for loading Windows XP ? Hmmm
Pencil and paper.
I remember running Qedit on a Compaq Contura Aero 486sx33 laptop, and it was spiffy. Quick to boot, did the job, and done. I even allocated a ramdisk for this purpose so I could get max battery life. I also had WP 6.0 while limited to 16 colors it also did the trick with minimal resources.
But I really don't miss the good old Dos days. Seriously! Tweeking with QEMM to maximize that 640k, having to tweak the config for that odd ball program that simply refused to run even if you shoved everything into himem, it just needed an extra kilobyte or so. Even 256 colors @ 640*480 was a dream for many programs as some vintage software was hard wired for a series of graphics chipsets. VESA support was a godsend, not that I had enough vid memory to support that on the POS laptop.
IBM tried releasing a dos webbrowser some years back, perhaps 1998 or so IIRC, and it was rather the same story, very limited support for 8 bit graphics, and you pretty much had to know your shit to get it working well, or invest in some hardware which defeats the point.
So while part of my understands going back to dos for speedy turn it on and type out some notes, the dos era was a fucking headache.
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
The Atari Portfolio Palmtop! Basically runs Dos 2.11. Couple of AA batteries. Open Lid, on. One keystroke and you are in an editor.
But seriously, just use a pen and paper.
... because emacs would fit you perfectly. It just lacks a good text editor :(
if you want to boot up in under a second (!) - and just bang in a couple lines of text and save - done (in less than twenty seconds) - the handiest text editor i've found is QED for the palm pilot. -- you could basically hit the power button, see and edit your text within 1 second of wake-up. click the power button again - and it would be away in your pocket - whip it out, click power again, and still be exactly where you left off -- now if only the iPod Touch could get something so advanced -- but it seems that iPod Touch thinks 3D animation and fancy transparency effects are more important than basic text editor functionality -- so the Palm still rules over the iPhone (in this department). although i have high hopes that the iPhone will, some year, actually get to have as useful text editor as the palm has had for the last ten years!
2cents
john penner.
Haiku (http://www.haiku-os.org/) is supposed to boot in about 10 seconds to a full GUI.
Only takes 25 seconds to restore from hibernation in XP on my laptop. That's not that long.
Of course, resume from sleep is a lot faster, but that will eat battery if you don't keep your laptop plugged in often.
Consider using a pad/pencil or carrying a small recorder.
If XP boots in 4m and Ubuntu in 1m, I recommend getting an SSD drive. Cuts boot time by a huge margin.
MacOS X typically wakes from sleep in about 2 seconds and is ready to do anything you want.
See subject.
This is not exactly what you asked for, but the Linpus Linux boots mine in exactly 21 seconds. Two seconds too long, I know ...
Well, I never shut down my Mac, I close it and it goes to sleep, then when I open it up it takes less than 10 secs to be usable, and it does not use much battery. If I close it for 30 min it takes 1-2% of the power I mean, barely noticeable.
What a weird noise...
Don't discard Emacs just yet, run this on top of Win95 B and you will get what you want. There's even a Windows keyboard compatibility mode so, CTRL ZXCV works as does CTRL S for save, the rest I can't remember ..
GNU Emacs FAQ for MS Windows
davecb5620@gmail.com
I was always impressed with QEDIT, it's macro language was fairly usefull ..
davecb5620@gmail.com
Haiku the OpenSource BeOS version will boot in about 10-15 seconds depending on your hardware.
If you configure it right (it's still pre-Alpha, so you have to configure a lot until you have it working somehow) you can easily even edit MS-DOC and have a full featured Office Suite (GoBe old but working good for most of the documents) and can listen to Music and watch Videos. (as long as your music chip is supported)
At the just-concluded Linux Plumbers Conference, Arjan van de Ven and Auke Kok demonstrated a netbook that went from powered off to GUI up in five seconds. Jaws dropped around the room. I haven't seen a formal write-up yet -- maybe LWN will cover it? -- but you can get a taste from the conference notes.
High points that I remember:
I know that no one here will care, but if you don't have dozens of programs starting up with Windows XP, it starts very quickly. My laptop is a Core2Duo 1.8Ghz with 2GB of RAM, so nothing cutting edge, and from a complete power off, it gets from selecting WinXp in grub to having Firefox loaded and displaying Google on my wireless in 23 seconds.
Coming from sleep, the computer is usable in 6 seconds, although it takes an additional 4 seconds for wireless to be back up.
Hibernation (with just Firefox w/ 4 tabs) takes 8 seconds to be usable, 4 additional seconds for wireless.
Note that these times (for hibernate and cold boot) are measured starting from when Grub begins booting the OS, as I don't think it's fair to count the BIOS time and Grub's menu against the OS, as that time would be added to any OS.
So, it may be that the answer to your 20 second boot time requirement is to use any operating system, and just don't start loads of crap with it.
When you close lid of a MacBook it goes to sleep (but not hibernate), and when you open it, the system comes about in under five seconds.
You just need to have a text editor open. This can be the default GUI Text Editor app, GUI Emacs, or vi or emacs in a Terminal session.
I don't know of any PDA that can access a fat32 'drive'. I do know that plenty that take SD cards. With a cig lighter or smaller sized adapter that card can be turned into a 'drive' on a computer. SD cards can hold up to 8 gig these days but price per gig the larger ones are still price. Good news is that you can fit 5 of them in a match box and if you stick with two to four gig cards it won't cost more than one hundred USAD.
Add a bluetooth or IR keyboard and key size won't even been an issue for typing. My hand writing sucks so I had to go digital a long time ago. I may be just one of the grunts at work but when it comes time for a meeting I pull out my PDA, a folding IR keyboard and am ready to take more notes than anyone else and I am able to do it faster than anyone else. And the whole thing fits in pocket as long as you aren't wearing denim.
Ascii artist &
Boot time, as fast as I can grab 'em.
Power requirement, none except some not too dim external light.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
thus I do not know if someone has mentioned an old operating system from the dark ages...
PEN and PAPER version 1.0
you can get a short ink pen and a small Ampad-brand leather-bound memo book with refills for around $5 total, and the notebook even survives repeated washings when you get drunk and leave it in your pants pocket
been carrying one for years, it "just works"
I do the same, just on my forehead.
How do you manage it?? mirror??
Setup your residential/office phone with 1. Voice recoder 2. Voice -> text converters 3. Connect it to a computer with internet And when you don't have a paper/pen and you have your mobile phone (I wonder where mankind is going) Call up any of those phones and say everything that you wanted to. Write some program to send those converted 'voice-text' as an email to your email id. Geeek enough?
XP Embedded SP2 has this funky Hibernate Once, Resume Many thing now. I don't know if it's possible to properly license the Embedded toolkit for personal use, but the technology is out there and it's interesting.
Easy, if you insiston anoperating system, DOS. 650K is more than enough for a simple text editor that is easier to use than VI. OpenDOS is free. It supports FAT32. Not counting the ROM POST of the system, DOS can boot in under 1 (one) second.
Bingo.
I've started carrying around my Palm T3 with the Palm keyboard. I type faster than I write and have a doodling app when I need to write simple diagrams. I have the wireless card when I need to check email etc.
Smaller and lighter than even a micro laptop and turns on right where I left off.
If you don't want to repeat the past, stop living in it.
A good one with a keyboard.
Wow, I should not post when knackered.
HP has a bootable DOS for USB keys. I presume there's support for writing to and from the USB key (duh), but don't know if the drivers can be reused in disk-based DOS system. I use it to make my usb bootable (actually, it's microSD with an adapter the size of the USB contacts). When I got it, HP was giving it away via free download. No, I don't have a link.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Vista boots from sleep in less than 2 seconds on my laptop. Isnt't it what you're looking for?
Of course, by accelerating a Vista box to near the speed of light, boot times become much more managable. Relativly speaking...
âoeWho knew something as harmless as willful ignorance could end up having real consequences?â
boot it up.
Close lid.
Open lid and work. Immediately. No "resume". No wait. It just works.
Close lide.
The biggest advantage of MacBooks IMHO is that they have NO startup time when opening the lid. The battery stays OK with a closed lid for about 3 days, so no need to really boot up.
Puppy Linux on a fast USB flash drive (session save), aka flash-Puppy. You can get a 4GB, 30 MB/s read and 20 MB/s write, USB flash drive for $15 off Newegg and that includes shipping. My systems automatically pick the USB drive to boot from whenever it is present at boot time.
PC-DOS 3.3 will boot in under twenty seconds at 4.mumble MHz, so on modern hardware it ought to be right near instantaneous. Back in the day I used an extremely cuspy little text editor called UED (short for "useful editor"), which I'm sure is still floating around and available someplace or another. (It was at one point distributed along with the DOS version of Online Bible. This was in the days before Windows came pre-installed on new computers, when most consumer software was still written for DOS, or in some cases for Mac and DOS.) UED doesn't have huge piles of features, but it can open up to nine files at a time, cut/copy/paste between them in full lines, traditional ranges, or rectangular blocks, among other features. (The handling of rectangular blocks is actually significantly better than in Emacs.) Its menu system is very straightforward, and everything is very discoverable. Oh, and it's small. (The version I have is 38704 bytes. Yes, I still have it sitting around, though I haven't attempted to use it lately, since I'm comfortable with Emacs now.)
One cool thing about this kind of option is that the partition you use for it can be a *tiny* (as in, measured in kilobytes, depending on how much data you need to be able to store there at once) FAT16 system, or even FAT12. Then in your main OS you can just mount it and copy/move the text files over, possibly in an init or login script. It takes up so little drive space, the menu configuration stuff to get the boot loader to offer it to you as an option on power-up is actually a significant fraction.
And speed? Oh, yes. I've used DOS 5 and UED on a Pentium II system (233 MHz), and it really screams. Greased lightning on wet ice, man. Makes vim look like molasses on a cold February night.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
There's an editor I used to put on all my DOS floppies called "TED" - it was 3KB of assembler, WYSIWYG monospaced text, and did most of what I needed if I didn't need regular expressions; otherwise I'd fire up some kind of vi or emacs clone. It was small enough that there was no reason to stick to EDLIN.
My DOS and Windows wallpaper back in those days was Saint Dogbert saying "Out Out!! You Demons of Stupidity!!" from the Dilbert cartoon, becuse that was obviously what "DOS" stood for.
I do have friends who were using the little HP palmtop computer that ran DOS as recently as a year or so ago; merely being way obsolete doesn't keep them from being one of the better personal organizers ever made. I had a Psion 3A that was of similar wonderfulness, though being a bit larger and heavier meant it got dropped a bit more often and eventually died.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
If you take notes on dead tree scraps and want to import them into your calendar or real notes, where they're much easier to retrieve when you want them, you'll have to retype them anyway. If you've got a cellphone with a keyboard, that means you don't need to haul a second device around. In my case, I'll need to get a Crackberry(tm) for work, but I'm currently using voice notes on my cellphone when I don't have a computer handy.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Voice Notetaking on a cellphone is really convenient for short notes - in my case the phone's a Nokia, but many other phones can do it with varying UI qualities. After all, the phone has voice compression hardware, and any phone with a camera has enough memory to store a lot of notes as well.
I've used PalmOS, and liked the integrated functionality and especially the Sync-With-MS-Outlook features, even though the OS in Palm3 - Palm7 days actually sucked rocks. Are text notes still limited to 4KB or whatever? (Unfortunately, I can no longer find the right drivers to sync my Palm7 with Outlook, plus my work laptop doesn't have a serial port any more :-) (And either Nokia's phone-sync software or my USB BlueTooth Widget's drivers or something also fail badly, so they can no longer sync up even though the could a year ago...)
Before I got the Palm3 I had a Psion 3A, an absolutely wonderful device that was one of the predecessors to Symbian. It was a bit too big, but in return it had a keyboard that let me type two-thumbed fast enough to take fairly full notes from phone messages or meetings, as opposed to PalmOS Graffiti which I was good at but could only do about half as fast.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
> Yeah, I'm a gentoober
Me too. In response to the question, I would recommend doing the basic stage 3 install, and not bother with X. Install vim/whatever and strip out anything that you don't require. If you really want fast booting, boot in single mode.
I'm not repeating myself
I'm an X window user; I'm an ex-Windows user
Seriously- if you need working TCP/IP or other networking, Windows 98 SE OPTIMIZED will cold boot on older hardware in less than 1 minute. I use WordPerfect 6.1 and on my Athlon XP2400 with mediocre hard disk, WordPerfect is fully up and functional in 1 second after I double-click the icon. No joke, and no preloader is running.
Windows 3.11 will boot even faster, but networking is trickier (painful).
Jef Raskin, of Mac fame, developed the SwyftCard - a ROM on a slot that acted as an embedded OS + word processor. You just turned on the machine and in under a second, wallah. Word processor. (It also did neat things like not requiring you to format a floppy in advance, too.)
Actually Vi is really friendly if you touch type already. Just take some time to learn Vi commands.
DOS is the king, baby! And there exists software to let DOS access FAT32, NTFS, USB devices, etc. You don't get plug'n'play, but you will get an OS that boots fast, uses very little ram and can use a friendly text editors.
Bearded Dragon
Aren't you more likely to have your cellphone in your pocket than be lugging around a laptop?
That wouldn't work for everyone. For instance, I carry a Virgin Mobile phone on a $65/yr plan for urgencies. The cheapest data plan for a smartphone would cost an order of magnitude more.
Yeah, but you're still pulling an initramfs, and then doing a regular init, which my method avoids.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Really. Boots almost instantly, up to 20 hours on a set of 4 AA batteries.
If all you need is something for writing text, it's hard to beat.
http://www.club100.org/
In 2001, the newspaper I worked for got rid of Atex (a PDP-11 based publishing system -- amazing in its own right) and replaced it with a more modern pagination system that involved an RS/6000 system on the backend and new-fangled Windows NT machines at the front.
A few of the reporters were still using Tandy 100/102 laptops to file stories. The Tandy 100 ran about 18 hours on four double-A batteries. It had a 300 baud modem to send stories. In short, it was awesome. One reporter specifically refused to accept a brand new IBM ThinkPad instead favoring the Tandy 102 for another year. (Once he discovered that the ThinkPad could download porn, he gave up the Tandy 102 willingly.)
The fully-funcational Tandy 102 laptop cost just $500 in 1986 and our reporters used it and the 100 for more than 15 years. Today a laptop will cost you about twice that, have a battery that last less than half as long and won't last you more than five years. Ah, progress.
I still have my collection of TRS gear... TRS-80 Model I, Model IV, Tandy 100, Tandy 102, Tandy 200. All boot except the Model I. The Model IV is becoming less useful because the 5 1/4 floppies aren't aging well. The Laptops, however, work great because everything is solid-state. No moving parts!
—Matt
Get yourself a smartphone. I just got my first one and have since started leaving my laptop in the bag more and more. When I do boot it, I do a quick sync. Everything you state is at your fingertips with no boot time at all.
instant on, ok for text (not rich text)
saves to compact flash card (for USB access)
cheap
just can't read it outside (depending on model)
I've had to mess about with udev rules and it will do _exactly_ what the parent says it will do.
Grandparent is wrong
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
For convenience, instead of using the CFFA's onboard CompactFlash slot, I'd get an IDE-to-CF adapter and connect it to the CFFA with an IDE cable.
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
Why do you not leave your PC always on, or always keep a pen & paper handy, if you have so many ideas and a non-functioning memory? I can't help you.
Pen and paper.
Matt,
Tommyknocker here. Someone just mentioned an IBM 2314 in a response to a comment of mine. This inspired me to check up on you and I'm surprised to find such a recent and serendipitously topical post!
Thanks again for taking Wheel and me through the-newspaper-you-worked-for-before-"the newspaper you worked for"'s data systems. We had a great time. Hope all is well with you and your wife and kids.
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky