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."

Comments

Not hard

[smittyoneeach]

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.

Re:Not hard

[Frnknstn]

add a slightly more robust text editor

I would recommend Nano http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nano_(text_editor) for this purpose. It's easier to use than vim or emacs, and more familiar if you have a MS-DOS 'Edit' background. If you don't need to do any heavy duty coding, Nano is more than powerful enough.

Re:Not hard

[TheSpoom]

Nano's actually decent for coding as well. You can set it up to do tab completion, code colourization, and other things one normally sees in GUI code editors.

Re:Not hard

[hairyfeet]

He might have a problem getting it to work,driver wise. He also said he wanted USB support,which is a royal PITA. Might I suggest you look into either Puppy Linux,DSL Linux or Feather Linux. I have put all three on many different kinds of hardware and they are all quite fast. You did not give the specs of your hardware so I will just give you my general observations. For older hardware Feather will give you the most speed,followed by DSL and Puppy,but there is only a few seconds difference.

That said I much prefer Puppy,as there are several builds and you can simply choose which version suits you. On a laptop MacPuppy is quite nice,and I have my most used programs at my fingertips thanks to the dock. But any one of these will give you the requirements you specified in your FA: Quick boot,USB support,and easy text editing. If you have USB 2.0 and a fast flash stick you might even prefer to leave the OS on the stick,which will allow you to carry your Operating System envirnment with you in your pocket. I hope this helps,and have a good weekend!

pico

[Lehk228]

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.

Re:DOS

[shiftless]

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.

Re:DOS

[Mateo_LeFou]

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/

Re:DOS

[c_g_hills]

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.

How about an older PDA?

[Nipok Nek]

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.

Re:Freedos?

[dvice_null]

"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.

Just to jot things down?

[Quiet_Desperation]

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! :)

Re:Wake up

[Simon80]

actually, it can: run

ls -l /dev/disk/by-uuid/

then add a line to your fstab like

UUID=133f762c-1837-42a4-81ad-6e84eb34a3f6 none swap sw 0 0

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.

Re:Wake up

[pizzach]

$> 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.

A blast from the past

[bobdotorg]

No USB drive compatibility, but instant on.

The love of newspaper field reporters for decades:

http://oldcomputers.net/trs100.html

Not bad for 1983.

You must be doing something wrong.

[Rui del-Negro]

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.

Re:DOS

[chill]

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.

Re:DOS

[fishyfool]

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.

Why booting is slow

[EmbeddedJanitor]

Most of the slowness in booting a Linux system is due to starting up all the services, USB plug n play stuff, etc etc.

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.

Re:Not all motherboards run coreboot

[jd]

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.

Re:Wake up

[Cl1mh4224rd]

Another words [...]

The phrase is "in other words"...