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

Wake up

[Renegade Lisp]

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.

Re:Wake up

[FalconZero]

Continuing your analogy and at the risk of starting an argument; It's more like he's asking for advice on increasing the performance of his car because he wants to get A to B in under 2 hours. If someone were to point out that the train only takes 1 hour, it would be a point worthy of consideration.

Re:Wake up

[ultranova]

If he had asked for advice on increasing performance of his car, and someone said cars are obsolete, just take a train, he may have a similar reaction.

The poster wanted to get a text editor open as fast as possible. Explaining to him that not shutting the computer down in the first place but simply putting it into a sleep mode is faster than booting is a perfectly valid and reasonable response. After all, it helps him towards his underlying goal.

To take your analogy, it's like asking for ways to increase your car's power to be able to travel between two distant cities faster, and being told that there's a maglev going every fifteen minutes. It's a perfectly valid answer.

Suspend to disk?

[FalconZero]

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?

DOS

[shiftless]

How about DOS?

Re:DOS

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a bootable OS. This is basically all a root kit is. ... ...

Just suspend

[Sarusa]

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.

The MIT Lisp Machine's "instaboot" feature

[NetSettler]

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.