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Fast-Booting Text-Editor Operating System?

Posted by timothy on from the hell-you-say dept.

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."

5 of 660 comments (clear)

  1. Not hard by smittyoneeach · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

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    1. Re:Not hard by Frnknstn · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

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    2. Re:Not hard by TheSpoom · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

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    3. Re:Not hard by hairyfeet · · Score: 5, Informative

      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!

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  2. Re:DOS by shiftless · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.