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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
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.
OK, in restrospect that's funny, but I was being serious. FreeDOS meets all his requirements. It boots to command line in just a few seconds, supports FAT32, is easy to use, and there are countless thousands of high quality text editors of all flavors available for it. It even has TCP/IP support and such, and it can be booted off the oldest, smallest, most worthless thumb drive that you possibly own.
Maybe you meant that as a joke, but you're not far off:
Kolibrios is a full, modern OS with a desktop. Written in Assembly, which as you can imagine makes in unbelievably fast. Can boot from a floppy.
I just tried it out a few days ago
http://www.kolibrios.org/
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
You can mount NTFS/ext2 in DOS using Paragon IFSDRV. There are probably drivers for other filesystems available if one looks around. A quick google reveals a long list of DOS software at www.unet.univie.ac.at.
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.
In that same vein, there's also MenuetOS, although I've never used it, so I can't vouch for how well it functions.
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?
"Eeepc 2G Surf cold boot to X in 10 sec" (the video is quite impressive, even you see the results in the title):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SzkQhHaFE0I
Some more details:
http://forum.eeeuser.com/viewtopic.php?id=25964
I have no doubt that FreeDOS can do better than that, but I'm actually curious how fast is it? And is the speed so much better that it is better than 10 seconds with a GUI.
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 can't think of anything that will boot faster, although EMACS will likely be the friendliest editor available.
Qedit
was my favorite from that time, not for windows as The SemWare Editor.
I had the unfortunate pleasure of owning a compaq contura aero 486sx33 laptop. I got it cheap as it was even for the time period a piece of shit, but it did the job. I often times avoided booting to windows to use qedit to take down notes and such.
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
actually, it can: run
then add a line to your fstab like
I'm not sure what the sw option is, couldn't find it in any of the expected manpages, so you may want to just use defaults instead.
$> man hibernate.conf
PowerdownMethod (requires UseSuspend2 on)
Allows you to choose what Software Suspend 2 should do after writing its image to disk. 3/4/5 will only work if you have ACPI enabled in your kernel. 3/4/5 correspond to the ACPI states S3 (suspend-to-RAM), S4 (suspend-to-disk), and S5 (power off). Choosing 3 will request your machine to enter the S3 Suspend-to-RAM state if it is supported - this allows you drastically cut the resume time waiting for your BIOS but still consumes power whilst hibernated (though the image is not lost should power run out). Choosing 4 will cause your machine to enter an S4 sleep state which may also reduce the resume time without using any power whilst hibernated. Choose ing 5 will cause your machine to switch off after suspending (traditional method) but might still cause your machine to resume when you open the lid. 0 bypasses ACPI and shuts off the machine completely.
Another words there is a another option that gives you instant on and protects against dead batteries on Linux. Apple computers do a version of this by default.
Once you start despising the jerks, you become one.
good idea, except that the "safe mode with command prompt" option that comes with XP boots up fully into safe mode, and the only difference is that it loads cmd.exe in a window as the shell instead of Explorer. You can actually exit out of cmd, give it a 3-finger salute, run program, and run "explorer" to get into "normal" safe mode.
XP doesn't have the underlying DOS that was there in Windows 9X. It's NT-based. Installing a multi-boot with FreeDOS might be an option, though. That was certainly my first thought.
If you believe everything you read, you'd better not read. - Japanese proverb
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.
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.
FreeDOS can boot from a USB stick. I have one at the office for flashing Dell server BIOS images. It boots pretty much in the blink of an eye. Very, very fast.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
You can also download the entire dos word suite from the microsoft website still. They just re-released the entire program for free on their website rather than patch it for y2k.
here is a non-ms mirror:
http://www.downloadsquad.com/2005/11/25/free-file/
---- Liquid was a patriot ----
Sleep does work with Mac OS X on a MacBook. I never turn mine off, I just shut the lid. When I want to use it again, it takes a few seconds to display the screen saver password prompt.
All I want is a secure system where it's easy to do anything I want. Is that too much to ask ~~ Randall Munroe
you can boot into dos from a usb drive formatted fat 32, all it requires is bios support. download the HP USB disk storage format tool http://www.pcworld.com/downloads/file/fid,64963-order,4-page,1-c,peripherals/description.html have a dos boot floppy handy for the necessary dos files. run the format tool, and then tell it where your dos files are. then install whatever dos tools you want from http://www.unet.univie.ac.at/~a0503736/php/drdoswiki/index.php?n=Main.Links it should run on any computer that can boot from usb.
Enjoy Every Sandwich
Try MenuetOS then http://www.menuetos.net/ It's what Kolibri is based on. At least, Kolibri is based on the Free Software 32bit MenuetOS. The author has since switched to a 64bit version which isn't Free Software (hence Kolibri exists).
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.
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
I'm pretty sure there is a config switch for it too, but ALT+L works for me.
Yes, it's called Safe Sleep. In fact, that whole article (on Hibernate) is informative for all the major OSes, but it could use information on BSD (and perhaps OS/2, if that even runs on laptops?)
For context, click Parent.
That's a cold boot. Hibernation actually can take longer, depending on how much RAM you have and how many pages are dirty.
No, the boot time is very long after an OS install because all the boot caches have to be rebuilt. Different computers require different drivers. Mac OS X combines all of the drivers for a specific machine along with the kernel and wraps them up into a single file so that it can be read in all at once (and fairly contiguously) instead of bouncing all around the disk reading thousands of individual files one at a time.
When the OS is updated, a number of those drivers change (and the kernel changes), so the OS has to go back through all the drivers and rebuild the cache. In the process of doing so, it is also loading each of those drivers the slow way (one file at a time), so booting takes a lot longer. The same thing happens if you carry a hard drive with a Mac OS X installation from one machine to another (unless they are roughly the same model of machine, that is).
Anyway, that boot cache is one big reason Mac OS X boots so quickly. Another big reason is that it puts off a lot of stuff until after it has booted so that it can bring up the UI as quickly as possible. In many cases, daemons may not all be started by the time Finder comes up, for example. The third reason is that Mac OS X runs a lot of daemons on demand, which means that the daemon starts running the first time something sends it a request. This further defers starting a lot of services until much later.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Here's the official list, but I tend to track the changelog, where chipsets and mainboards are added almost daily. I suggest looking at the Freshmeat record, where I've noted what has been added to the software prior to being officially designated as verified.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Another words [...]
The phrase is "in other words"...
People will pass up steak once a week, for crap every day.
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
FreeDOS is not quite the old DOS you are thinking about.
http://www.freedos.org/freedos/news/technote/190.html
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.