Slashdot Mirror
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."
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
How about DOS?
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.
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.
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.
"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 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.
Eh, sleep and wake usually work on a Mac but not always and it can cause side effects.
Just yesterday I opened up my MacBook Pro's screen and the thing wouldn't wake up; after futzing around with it, I closed it and opened it again and I was hit with two login prompts (I have it set to require login). At other times, I've closed my laptop it'll randomly wake up while it's closed - even with no peripherals attached and nothing physically done to it immediately preceding the wake up. The latter problem hasn't happened to me in a little while, but I'm not sure if it's been fixed or it's just taking a break.
Even when it works, sleep/wake cycling seems to cause some apps to balloon their cache, which eventually becomes problematic. If he's really just using a text editor (and not, say, firefox), then it probably wouldn't matter.
boot a GUI-less linux install and use pico/nano for text editing.
I agree. Booting my CentOS 5 servers in single-user mode take less than 20 seconds from the kernel starts to load until I can run Emacs. It's actually more like 10 seconds.
I excluded BIOS startup because it is highly variable. My home desktop passes its BIOS startup in around 10 seconds, while our HP server blades at work take almost a minute to just get to GRUB.
I don't even have an iPhone and I do this.. Most of the time I send small SMS messages to my email account. if it's truly worth jotting down then it's worth being backed up out in the ether ;)
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.
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
Solution: Carry a notepad to scribble on instead of being a douche bag and having to boot a second operating system and all that shit
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.
Palm OS installed on Palm hardware. Seriously, nothing beats this.
Blimey, things have advanced then. Is this with XP or Vista, out of interest?
My barometer is how many people I see at work wandering the corridors with their laptop, but holding it horizontal with the lid not quite closed. It's basically everyone with a laptop. Until that changes I'll assume in general Windows is still a bit unreliable at this.
XP.
It's worked fine for some time. I suspect that most people don't have the laptop set to standby when they close the lid or don't know that they can.
So you're saying that a Mac can resume from a suspend-to-RAM faster than other operating systems can boot? Did you know that other popular operating systems, such as Windows and Linux, can also suspend to RAM? And will therefore start up at probably about the same speed as a Mac? Or are Macs somehow soooooo much better than other computers?