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

[Reikk]

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

Re:Not hard

[Penguin Follower]

I second that suggestion to use Nano. Nano is great! :)

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

[Ian Alexander]

This use-case is one where I would not recommend emacs.

Why not? It's a perfect solution: an operating system which can edit text, too!

Re:Not hard

[smittyoneeach]

The full emacs distro would outweigh the rest of the initramfs by a lot.
Particularly with any reasonable supporting libraries.
Total overkill for a text editing requirement.

Re:Not hard

[hawk]

>This use-case is one where I would not recommend emacs.

Well, yeah.

Most of us figured that out when he said he needed to edit . . . :)

More seriously, the obvious solution is to add a usb adaptor to a Tandy 100/102 . . .

hawk, off to find his 102

Re:Not hard

[pacinpm]

Palm OS installed on Palm hardware. Seriously, nothing beats this.

Re:Not hard

[Kalvos]

It's got a serial output. Piece of cake. I used one for years, well into the Windows era.

Re:Not hard

[smittyoneeach]

I have a Nokia E61, you insensitive clod!

Re:Not hard

[Anonymous Coward]

there is a requirement that it be able to access FAT32 volumes, I assume the original poster means a USB drive. For this, I would say get a plain, simple PDA that has USB host functionality. I have a Toshiba e805 with VGA screen. I can turn it on and be in a text editor in about 20 seconds. I picked up the "expansion pack" for about $20 a while back that adds USB host and VGA out functionality. I put in a 4GB SD card for programs, and that leaves the CF for other stuff, I can even hook up the usb port to a hub and use a usb keyboard and mouse to type in a text editor (nice rollup keyboard) while accessing an external USB drive. You can even use SoftMaker office to edit full office documents or compose presentations.

Though a lot of the folks on here will lie about it and give grief, the handwriting recognition in Windows Mobile is scarily accurate assuming you have even remotely understandable handwriting, and if not, its just as accurate with a little training.

Re:Not hard

[failedlogic]

It can? Neato didn't know that. Only thing that bugs me is the screen wrap as it lets you keep typing across w/o hard enter. A fix for that too?

Re:Not hard

[kesuki]

personally i like damn small linux myself. it boots pretty quick for a gui without messing around...

Re:Not hard

[dylan_-]

It can? Neato didn't know that. Only thing that bugs me is the screen wrap as it lets you keep typing across w/o hard enter. A fix for that too?

Start with the -w switch (e.g. "nano -w myfile.txt") or put "set nowrap" in your .nanorc (or /etc/nanorc if you want it global).

Re:Not hard

[laddiebuck]

Trust me, nano programmers, just take a deep breath and a few days of getting used to it, and just learn vim or emacs. You'll be grateful you did; and you'll wonder how you ever used the prison of editors like pico or nano.

I know because I used to use pico (I didn't like some of the changes nano made; pico was more stable for me) for years and got reasonably productive. What it took was for someone to loudly laugh at me when he asked me about what text editor I used. I learned vim within the week and it's a different world; I am five times more productive for general programming and text editing, and now I use my editor for a million tasks that I would previously have used scripts for.

Re:Not hard

[laddiebuck]

I should add that this also goes for people using GUI editors, or IDEs. IDEs have nice features, but they usually suck as editors and it's typically hard to embed a decent editor in them. But this changes every so often. Not to mention that if you really need IDE-like features, there are third-party extensions for both vim and emacs to provide them, although I don't use them myself, preferring to just use the shell (yes, even for Java work).

Re:Not hard

[quenda]

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

But does it have a full IDE, web-browser, calendar, IRC, spreadsheet, email, calculator, psychiatrist and canonised author?

Re:Not hard

[TheSpoom]

Nope! Cause, y'know, it's a text editor. It does good at being a text editor.

(Yeah, I know you're talking about emacs. I don't care.)

Re:Not hard

[smittyoneeach]

Yeah, but my suggestion is strictly the boot image pulled up by GRUB.
DSL is a whole lotta rosie in comparison.

Re:Not hard

[magisterx]

Have you thought about just using dos? Even on older hardware, if all you load is the OS itself and perhaps have edit in autoexec.bat it is up in seconds.

Re:Not hard

[Richard Steiner]

I know emacs, vim, and NEdit, and I would MUCH rather use the latter.

While I agree that vi knowledge is probably needed just as a general skill (you know that some variant of vi will always be present on a modern UNIX box), I disagree that it (or emacs) is a "better" general programmers editor. For me, at least, it isn't.

Re:Not hard

[Arker]

Unixtree contains some extra functionality, mostly file management, which wouldnt be bad to have anyway.

It's pretty small as well.

For many years I used DOS+Xtree Gold for this sort of thing, whole system fit on a floppy disk (with some of the optional Xtree modules removed) and it worked great. But I dont think that system could (at least easily) be set up to support the newer file systems the OP needs to work with, however a linux+busybox+unixtree system should be the up-to-date equivelant.

Re:Not hard

[GigaplexNZ]

No, but don't forget that emacs is a good operating system and application suite in need of a good text editor.

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!

Re:Not hard

[mechsoph]

M-x viper

Re:Not hard

[onionlee]

nano?! REAL coders use vi!

Re:Not hard

[kdemetter]

You are probably right , but not everyone needs the features of vim , and so why should they learn it , when there's an easier way ?

nano is as good as it gets if you just want it plain and simple.

vim is a lot more powerful , and as a result more complex.

Re:Not hard

[kdemetter]

it works better with a picture :

http://xkcd.com/378/

Re:Not hard

[Cecil]

vim is by far the most efficient. I'm comfortable in other editors, certainly, often more comfortable than I am in vim. But vim will always be faster and more efficient. Rarely is even the most complex command more than a few keystrokes away.

It depends how you define "better" and "best", but I don't think anything can beat vim for efficiency, and that's definitely what some people define as best.

Re:Not hard

[Cecil]

Most people do need the features of vim, they just don't realize or understand when they need them.

As an analogy, imagine that you said "Not everyone needs the power of functions/subroutines, so why should they learn it, when there's an easier way? Copying and pasting chunks of code repeatedly is fine if you just want it plain and simple"

Just because it works doesn't mean it's an excuse not to learn how to do it better.

Re:Not hard

[drix]

I'm an Emacs guy who can't stand Nano and can't be bothered to learn Vim. Then I discovered e3, a ridiculously fast little editor written entirely in assembler. It has key bindings for Emacs, VIM, Pico, and every other major text editor out there. Actually I think it's now what pops up on Ubuntu when you type in "emacs" by default.

Re:Not hard

[wolftone]

One problem with Nano is its limited Undo/Redo. Perhaps a better option is JOE. I've never really used JOE, but it appears to be able to use a Pico (what Nano was originally based on) mode as well as an Emacs mode.

Re:Not hard

[Anonymous Coward]

And not running like a drunkard when most OS's are just getting to their desktop and "appear" ready but are really still booting.

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?

Re:Not hard

[julesh]

Why not? It's a perfect solution: an operating system which can edit text, too!

Yeah, but he's looking for a _lightweight_ operating system.

Re:Not hard

[wolftone]

Someone above advised e3 which is what I wanted to advise, but I forgot the name. Very small, very fast, and has the option to run with emacs-, vi-, nano-, nedit-, and wordstar-like keybindings. Again, though, my experience with e3 is very limited, so I can't really tell you if this is the right editor.

Re:Not hard

[amdpox]

I completely agree - vi seems daunting and stupid when you first attempt it, but after a couple of days of adjusting, it allows me to do so many things, so quickly. I was basically told to use vi on my first day at a job, and I now understand why.

Re:Not hard

[hasdikarlsam]

Or you could type in "sudo pmset hibernatemode 0" to disable the write-to-disk behaviour. Or 1 to make it shut off entirely, every time. Personally, I prefer 0.

(The default is 3, by the way. I never dared to try 2.)

Re:Not hard

[Jesus_666]

alias nano='nano -w'

Re:Not hard

[billcopc]

That's why you should do a static build :)

Screw the initrd, just dd the emacs executable to the boot sector!

Re:Not hard

[smittyoneeach]

I use the stock vi under Solaris 10 at the job, and the nicest thing I have to say about it is that its the POSIX standard editor, and one should be competent with it at least.
After that, emacs crushes vi in every particular except size of the executable.

Re:Not hard

[smittyoneeach]

While funny, you realize that the lack of a kernel and hardware support would choke this right after GRUB pulled the emacs image (all of it) into ram and tried to tell it to unpack itself, which the kernel proper accomplishes by having cpio compiled in.

Re:Not hard

[Lennie]

I bought a E70 instead.

Re:Not hard

[smittyoneeach]

I'm such a huge fan of the Symbian OS.
Kinda obvious the coders eat their own dogfood--I have to look hard for even minor things I'd change about the functionality.
The desktop application is great, too. This is the first cel phone I have regularly used as a wireless modem. Props to T-Mobile. Now, if they could just make a Linux version available...

Re:Not hard

[v1]

I don't think you can use mode 2 since bit 1 appears to be an added option to bit 0's behavior. Mode 1 is the one that looks a bit strange. (immediate hibernation on sleep?) I've seen mac pros hibernate which I was not expecting... must have manually set mode 3 on them.

Re:Not hard

[russotto]

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

Or, as an alternative to that low-tech stuff, you could carry a PDA. Then you can even transfer to the computer if you want.

Re:Not hard

[leuk_he]

can it access fat32 usb?

Re:Not hard

[Ant P.]

Well it can run a TCP/IP stack, so you could just put the usb drive on an ftp share...

Re:Not hard

[Annymouse Cowherd]

Damn Small Linux and friends don't boot particularly fast, usually about 30 seconds.

Re:Not hard

[ravster]

Thats what she said

Re:Not hard

[kisrael]

I'd say there are different types of "efficiency"; I find "concise keystrokes" to be among the least useful for me purposefully, since what I look for in an editor is "low mental load", i.e., don't give me a lot to keep track of, just give me a small suite of simple keystrokes (and, given my history, this is preferably the Windows-flavor of what originated on the Mac ctrl-x,v,c, etc, with shift-select, good use of home and end keys, etc)

In particular, the "mental load" of modal editors bugs the hell out of me.

The other thing too many editors miss is really clear macro recording capabilities...

I'm not saying you're wrong about what works for you, since you're right on w/ a certain kind of power user... just explaining how what some other geeks look for in editors.

Re:Not hard

[laddiebuck]

I used to be guilty of that -- I coded for years on a TI-83 and never thought why I would need functions or any of that. Then I used C for years without discovering the importance of certain things in functional programming. Today, thankfully, I've outgrown that mental conservatism.

Re:Not hard

[laddiebuck]

Not to be combative, but there's far more to vi than keybindings or editing modes. Hell, zsh has vi keybindings, modal and everything.

Re:Not hard

[laddiebuck]

It's true that there's more mental load with a modal editor -- initially. In my own case, this lasted for weeks to a month after I started using vim.

During that time, I also took care to learn new vi commands every day, so that by the time I really got used to vim, I was also quite efficient with it.

The thing about vi is not that keystrokes are concise. What it's really about is that it gives you enormous expressive power to manipulate text. The fact that the commands are expressed tersely is necessary because if what it did was expressed in Perl or Java would take paragraphs of verbose code. By contrast, the vi user rarely types anything more than 30 actual control characters in any one command, and typically just 5 or so.

Re:Not hard

[laddiebuck]

I quite forgot to say that as you mention macros, they're very useful in vim, and in fact can be edited directly (as commands are no more than text). I had great fun using vim macros as short scripts on text.

Re:Not hard

[Arterion]

I was going to say the exact same thing. Just carry a pencil and some paper. Only a douchebag would boot up a laptop to open notepad and save some little note in a text file.

Re:Not hard

[wiredlogic]

You forgot the killer feature... the inclusion of a kitchen sink, at least for that abominable forked version.

Re:Not hard

[hairyfeet]

You have to recompile(which really isn't hard and there are plenty of tutorials for) if you want warp speed. Simply take out support for hardware you don't have(SCSI,SATA,etc) in the particular machine and you can cut down on that time by a lot. Since he is also simply using it as a note taker he could cut out wireless and sound and gain even more speed.

The point of using Puppy or DSL is that you have a wide range of hardware support and it is already lean. By thinning it down even more and customizing it for your hardware you CAN get it closer to an "instant on" appliance,it just takes a little work. Believe me,I know,as I did the same trick with some 233MHz that I was donating to a church. With a little tweaking it made an almost "instant on" database appliance which they use to keep track of donations,names and addresses for their mailing,etc. Like I said,it'll just take him a little time and a little forum cruising.

Sorry I didn't save my notes so I could post them somewhere for him,but it was a real "one off" kind of job and I didn't really see the point of saving my notes. I figured if I learned how to do it once,I could learn how again and the tech will have changed so I'd probably need to learn new tricks anyway. They also have SkinnyPup which I haven't really played with because for me it is TOO thin,but for what he is wanting to do he might want to give it a try. Also you get a nice speed boost from installing Puppy to the HDD instead of going LiveCD.

So if he were my customer and came in with that request,I would first try MacPuppy or DSL and see if that suited his needs. If not,I would use SkinnyPup as a base and recompile with only the barest support for the hardware he needs,which should easily fit it into his requirements. But as always this is my 02c,YMMV

Re:Not hard

[Pharmboy]

Why not just DOS, such as FreeDOS and any text editor to begin with? The entire operating system and editor fits on a floppy disk and takes about 10 seconds to install. I love using linux, but for this task, even the most stripped version would be bloated.

Re:Not hard

[smittyoneeach]

Have you ever considered perusing the thread, to see how many times the suggestion has been made, or is this a Palm text ad?
Next time throw in a URL.

Re:Not hard

[billcopc]

You foolishly underestimate the power of emacs, young grasshopper.

Re:Not hard

[smittyoneeach]

I do love my emacs, but even the Dirty, Harry love has to know its limitations.

Re:Not hard

[MilesAttacca]

I use Damn Small Linux and I will agree it is fast...once hardware detection's completed. Is there any way to store the results of the detection routine, so that instead of checking for the presence of all hardware at every. single. bootup...it'll read the config from a textfile and just load those drivers straight off? That would make DSL probably five times faster to boot.

Re:Not hard

[smittyoneeach]

And of course it's *really hard* to sync all your data like on Palm.

Haven't noticed that one, sorry.

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

[Anonymous Coward]

It's less than 2 seconds for me under Vis NO CARRIER

Re:Wake up

[Anonymous Coward]

Hibernate is not always a practical solution.

For instance, I have an eee PC, with 2GB ram, and 4GB internal flash drive.

To be able to hibernate, I'd have to have a 2GB swap file, which would mean not using over half of the flash drive.

If Linux could reliably identify the external USB flash drives and the card reader always with the same mount point, this would not be a problem. As I could put the swap file on them. But Linux can't do that.

Re:Wake up

[norbac]

Same here on Vista... This person is doing something seriously wrong.

Re:Wake up

[jd]

LinuxBIOS/Coreboot will get a system up in 3 seconds or less. Add in a busybox/light distro, and you've usable editors, network tools, utilities and the BSD games available about as fast as you'll get. Well, if you replace the flash with a large enough PROM, you might shave a little more time, as a permanent gate should be faster than a programmable gate.

Re:Wake up

[boshi]

My laptop suspends to disk around the same time as it suspends to ram, so if it was sleeping and you yanked my battery it would just mean an extra 10 or so seconds to wake it up.

Re:Wake up

[StackedCrooked]

Nothing wrong with some out of the box thinking. Btw, you are free to ignore the responses you don't like and focus on the ones that you do find helpful.

Re:Wake up

[rincebrain]

Not true.

It might not do it nicely for you by default, but you can configure udev rules to guarantee the mount points correctly.

Re:Wake up

[Vectronic]

True, however if you are going to be using it for a few hours/most of the day as just a notepad, or will only be using it for a single application, then you could/should be able to disable a dimm, or otherwise limit the memory in the BIOS which would knock it down to 1GB, and thats far more do-able (on a 4GB drive) or even 512MB if its in 4 dimms... and should still easily support whatever quick apps you need (on XP or Linux anyways)

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.

Re:Wake up

[dgatwood]

The best choice for you is probably Mac OS X.... Mac OS X cold boots in about 20-25 seconds on a Macbook....

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.

Re:Wake up

[LittleBigScript]

I agree with working around boot-up time on a laptop if it supports a suspend mode, through ahci. He mentions boot-up time being a problem, but he also mentions that he has a laptop.

Re:Wake up

[jeremyp]

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.

Re:Wake up

[ArsonSmith]

No you are ignoring his request and just solving his end goal. His request had two requirements.

1) boot fast
2) get to a text editor in under 20 seconds

If I asked how can I make my car go faster, I'd like to be able to get from A-B in under 2 hours and you say take the train it'll get you there in 1. That's great but it only solves half the problem and creates another. My car is still slow, and now once I get to point 'b' I have no car to get around.

Re:Wake up

[ArsonSmith]

for you if a hot chick walked up to you and said i want to have your baby, you would take her to the sperm bank

Re:Wake up

[donstenk]

Exactly my thoughts.... have not booted my 2 year old MacBook since I have it.

Oh, and it takes a second, by the way.

Re:Wake up

[jsebrech]

My car is still slow, and now once I get to point 'b' I have no car to get around.

The analogy is flawed. In this case, using the "sleep" function of the laptop doesn't take away any of the laptop's functionality. In fact, using the sleep function is probably the best advice, since any fast-booting OS will probably be less capable than the OS it has right now.

Re:Wake up

[A non-mouse Coward]

OK, but what about cold boot attacks?

Re:Wake up

[ArsonSmith]

The details are flawed, it's an analogy they're suppose to be, the comparison is the same. You are assuming that his only goal is requirement 2. Perhaps he has other reasons for requirement 1 and requirement 2 was an example of his other reasons. If he had asked, "What's the fastest way to get to a text editor?" then you would have been right.

Re:Wake up

[Orange Crush]

Is that really a cold boot, or resuming from hibernation? I noticed on my parents' iMac the boot time was much longer the first time after installing an OSX patch and I figured it was just because OSX had to truly shut down completely and reboot from scratch to apply the patch.

Re:Wake up

[wiresquire]

Agreed. The summary is a classic example of poorly written requirements that makes assumptions about the solution.

Spend more time on what you want to do and why you want to do it. Don't say HOW.

ws

Re:Wake up

[DarkAvZ]

You have not opened it yet?

Re:Wake up

[me at werk]

Apple computers do a version of this by default.

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?)

Re:Wake up

[dgatwood]

That's a cold boot. Hibernation actually can take longer, depending on how much RAM you have and how many pages are dirty.

I noticed on my parents' iMac the boot time was much longer the first time after installing an OSX patch and I figured it was just because OSX had to truly shut down completely and reboot from scratch to apply the patch.

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.

Re:Wake up

[Galactic Dominator]

Perfectly valid if the question was how to travel between point A and B faster. When the question specifically states using method X, replacing it with Y is not valid.

You would have gotten that question wrong on an math exam if the instructor called for one method of solving an equation and you substituted another, regardless of whether your method is more efficient.

Re:Wake up

[ArsonSmith]

Ok hows this, How can I make my computer go from a cold, shut down, state to a text editor in under 20 seconds or less?

Re:Wake up

[daybot]

The best choice for you is probably Mac OS X.... Mac OS X cold boots in about 20-25 seconds on a Macbook....

Some figures from my C2D MacBook Pro:

Power on to login screen: 00:48
Login screen to dock: 00:42
Finish spinning beach ball: 00:41
Finish disk chugging: 01:36
Open Safari first time: 00:30
Open iTunes first time: 00:24
Open Dashboard first time: 00:12

I only ever cold boot for system updates and the sleep functions well, but it's a good job, because it takes almost five minutes to cold boot and get the essentials running. Leopard is very slow booting - Tiger was much faster, and hopefully Snow Leopard will restore sanity to my boot times.

Re:Wake up

[Free the Cowards]

Then his question was badly asked. You don't ask a question on how to do A so that you can then do B, then reject an answer that gives you B without A. It's nonsensical and antisocial, and you're being silly for defending it.

Re:Wake up

[Cl1mh4224rd]

Another words [...]

The phrase is "in other words"...

Re:Wake up

[magarity]

Suspend to disk instead of just sleep makes the questioner's 20 second requirement and doesn't trickle away the battery if he plans to carry it around a lot while it's off. I suppose it depends on the ratio of sleep/suspend time to use time which one is better. I always use suspend to prevent the battery running out if I'm not paying attention, or when travelling if a TSA goon pulls the battery or somesuch.

Re:Wake up

[pizzach]

Crap. That's strike two for me. ;-p Thanks.

Re:Wake up

[timbck2]

You haven't installed any OS or security updates in 2 years? I don't believe you.

Re:Wake up

[spazdor]

Anyone reading the discussion from top to bottom may wish to keep a finger on the PgDn key from here on in.

What follows is at least 4 pagefuls of shitty car metaphors.

Re:Wake up

[shellbeach]

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.

Of course, you're assuming that your BIOS's implementation of S3 works with linux. Mine never has.

As for the poster's original question, if it's really that important I'd recommend compiling your own minimalist kernel, and writing your own boot scripts. Years ago, I got Crux linux to boot to a login prompt in 15 seconds from power on, using an old P120 laptop. On today's hardware, you should be able to start linux in a few seconds with your own custom kernel.

(Remember: most of the sh*t in the boot scripts included in distros is not needed for your own configuration. You want fast, just re-write them to suit your own hardware. It's simple and easy to do. Crux is a pretty good starter system, if you want to do this.)

Re:Wake up

[Macman408]

I actually prefer to read the discussion completely unnested, and from left to right. It requires a really tall monitor, but I enjoy the challenge.

You see, it's a lot like drifting...

Re:Wake up

[Provocateur]

That's it, gents: I hereby declare the death of the car analogy. From this point on, we shall now use, If a hot chick walked up to you...analogies, to broaden the appeal of slahsdot discussion forums to a much wider, possibly younger demographic. Hopefully they are from the tech crowd as well, but not from digg.

Re:Wake up

[NemosomeN]

Not all laptops are good with sleeping. My Asus Eee is a wonderful laptop, love it. But the harddrive is too small to waste on a hibernate file, and sleep draws way too much power (It has a long battery life despite having a small battery - it's just low draw. Sleep draws about the same power no matter what. So on smaller batteries, sleep is expensive).

Re:Wake up

[kramerd]

No, its like asking how to get his car's engine to turn on faster so he can drive it, and you responding to keep the car on at all times.

While it is a perfectly reasonable thing to do if you have an electric car and can just run it off an outlet, under many circumstances (such as if you can't afford or simply chose not to run your car 24/7), it is not possible or efficient. It is not a solution to direct issue either.

To put this in a food analogy (which is just as valid as a car analogy, despite the fact that this is /.), if I asked you how to make fried chicken faster, because getting the oil to boil takes too long, and you responded that I should just always keep a batch of oil boiling, you would be correct, but it would be an inefficient solution, and not the task orientation that I would be looking for.

The best example, of course, would be if I were working out and wanted to record my progress quickly in an electronic format, you could tell me to keep my text editor on at all times. Granted, the simple solution would be to use a pen and paper, but I suppose telling me to send myself a text message on my cell phone would be a viable option, even if it is an unreasonable one.

Re:Wake up

[Sam Lowry]

Wakeup from sleep is actually very fast in the latest Linux kernels. 5 seconds is what I get, as well, on an HP 6910p

Re:Wake up

[T3Tech]

I'm still using an A2000 and don't mess with anything else, you insensitive clod!

Re:Wake up

[Fweeky]

The sw option is a legacy thing, I think; it used to be that swapon -a would only activate devices of type swap with options sw; as of util-linux 2.12, released in early 2004, swapon -a activates all devices of type swap without options noauto, hence behaving like every other fstab entry and making options sw superfluous.

Re:Wake up

[hasdikarlsam]

Sometimes the screen saver *crashes*, and it becomes impossible to unlock.
Sometimes it just refuses to power on for no apparent reason.

Turning off the screen-saver password, for some bizarre reason, fixes both problems. Of course, that does mean I have to pay attention to where I've put my laptop..

Re:Wake up

[dgatwood]

Either your hard drive is an older model than the current one or you don't have nearly enough RAM. My MacBook (3GB) with an Apple-labeled 7200 RPM Seagate drive boots to Finder in 27 seconds from when I hit the power button. Safari launch is so close to instantaneous that it isn't worth timing. iTunes launch takes about 12 seconds. Dashboard: about three seconds, two of which are spent blocked waiting for hosts out on the Internet to reply.

Seriously, if it takes 30 seconds to launch Safari with a current MBP, something is massively wrong. It only takes 22 seconds (in 10.4, admittedly) on my old G3 PowerBook... while still paging from the boot.... Get more RAM.

Re:Wake up

[rsborg]

Sometimes the screen saver *crashes*, and it becomes impossible to unlock. Sometimes it just refuses to power on for no apparent reason. Turning off the screen-saver password, for some bizarre reason, fixes both problems. Of course, that does mean I have to pay attention to where I've put my laptop..

Are you running Tiger? The password screen hanging issue happens to my wife's powerbook too. She deals with it by simply closing the lid again, which seems to reset the password request.

Re:Wake up

[TheNetAvenger]

Why does Apple even get mentioned here?

OS X didn't even have a suspend to disk/hibernate option while Windows users were enjoying both hybrid suspend and hibernate.

Vista adds in a dual mode that initiates the hibernate 'write' during the suspend, so if power is lost it is still available.

However, XP would do suspend and then when it detected a low battery would do a full hibernate. (Basically the same thing, just the hibernate write happens only when needed.)

Yet... Apple after catching up several years later is the OS people think of when it comes to Sx states and instant on?

WTF is wrong with people?

Also WTF is it with boot times? Who in the hell doesn't use suspend or hibernate mechanisms on a computer, especially a laptop anymore?

As for Boot Times, I see pokes at Vista.

Is 20 secs to Desktop on a 2004 HP Laptop with 1GB of RAM really that slow? How about 15secs on a Clevo 2005 laptop?

Suspend resume, Vista, Instant.
Hibernate resume, 4-5 secs.

I would love to get OS X or ANY LINUX distribution to boot or resume as fast as Vista on the same hardware.

I know this is SlashDot, but what type of crap virtualized tests have people been using to get 4min Vista or XP boot times?

Holy freaking cow, I have a 200mhz 80GB 1997 laptop with XP that fully boots to desktop in under 1 min. It even resumes from hibernate in 10 secs. (With original 5gb 4200rpm HD even)

Geesh...

Re:Wake up

[eugene ts wong]

lol

I thought that you were just being funny and/or cynical about the car metaphors.

lol

Re:Wake up

[daybot]

Get more RAM.

4GB dude... I think it's the speed of the hard drive - I have the 4200RPM drive for noise and battery life but that's the trade-off. It's interesting to see your figures.

Re:Wake up

[WuphonsReach]

From doing a bit of traveling with older laptops ('01-'05), leaving a laptop in sleep mode doesn't use all that much power over hibernate (suspend to disk).

However, I've not had to deal with TSA goons who pull battery packs out.

Re:Wake up

[Henk Poley]

No, half a second can be right. Try loading a lot of tabs, browse in them until the browser dies. Now start Safari again. It will be slow, probably cleaning up caches.

I'm seeing it all the time, as this is my usual way of needing to start the browser (again).

Re:Wake up

[craagz]

.. but what about getting to the Train? Will there be transport from the train station to the point where he wants to be?

Re:Wake up

[clone53421]

If I asked how can I make my car go faster, I'd like to be able to get from A-B in under 2 hours and you say take the train it'll get you there in 1. That's great but it only solves half the problem and creates another. My car is still slow, and now once I get to point 'b' I have no car to get around.

And how exactly is that modification to the analogy in ANY way relevant to the original post? You know, the one where he said he can pull out his computer and in 5 seconds he has his OS up and fully functional?

Re:Wake up

[dgatwood]

Ah. Yes, that makes a huge difference. I have a 7200 RPM Apple drive. I didn't know the MacBook Pro was available with the 7200 RPM drive. I guess that's an option that is no longer offered.

That said, I wouldn't have expected the difference to be quite that extreme (factor of 15 on Safari launch is HUGE)... except that the 4200 was a couple generations of hard drive back and laptop drives have increased in performance a lot recently. IIRC, there was a significant performance difference between the 7200.1 and the 7200.2 Momentus series in Seagate's line just in the last two years or so.

Re:Wake up

[dgatwood]

And just to clarify that first paragraph, by Apple drive, I mean I have an Apple-label 7200.2 Seagate Momentus....

Re:Wake up

[donstenk]

Haha, I said booted, not rebooted. I have done that and it seems I am doing it more often as there are more updates - or so it seems. It is rather annoying. One of the reasons I closed on windows was the constant nagging: windows update, antivirus, antithis and that.

Never been in the situation though that I needed the computer and had to wait for it to start.

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?

Re:Suspend to disk?

[gbjbaanb]

You don't need a new OS, you need a new motherboard.

Asus has "Express Gate" on their newer mobos that allow you to boot into a web-surfing, email only mini OS in "less than 5 seconds" without having to worry about whether you slept, suspended or hibernated the previous tme you shut down your PC.

Ok, its basically an on-board Linix distro, so you do need a better OS after all.

Re:Suspend to disk?

[pimpimpim]

btw my pentium 100 aptiva from 1996 could do this. IBM rapidstart or something, it worked flawlessly. IBM seems like a slowly progressing company, but sometimes they hit the nail just right, ages before anyone else does. On a similar note: Please bring back lotus wordpro, big blue!

Re:Suspend to disk?

[dw604]

Does it allow you to write changes to an NTFS partition?

toms root

[alex4u2nv]

tomsroot http://www.toms.net/rb/

Re:toms root

[aronzak]

No good. It has no SCSI (and thus no USB drivers). It had it's day but is no good these days. I'd recommend ttylinux.

DOS

[shiftless]

How about DOS?

Re:DOS

[smittyoneeach]

Actually not a bad idea.
Except that you're likely to hate the filesystem choices available.

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.

Re:DOS

[ZosX]

Nice. Their files included a trojan and a rootkit, at least according to avast. Maybe false positives. Maybe not. Who can say? The rootkit was the telling one.

Re:DOS

[Anonymous Coward]

In that same vein, there's also MenuetOS, although I've never used it, so I can't vouch for how well it functions.

Re:DOS

[Anonymous Coward]

How about emacs?
When I type emacs, starts in about five seconds.
Problem is there is no decent editor ported to it yet...

Re:DOS

[jkerman]

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

Re:DOS

[Kooglebot]

FreeDOS (and MS-DOS too) can't access USB flash drives -- at least not out of the box, without a (nonfree, hard-to-find) third party utility of some kind. Not in my experience, anyway. If you actually boot from the drive, that will work, since it is recognized by the BIOS (if it is a new enough board), and not the the OS (which cannot). You probably don't want to do that, though.

Re:DOS

[KillerBob]

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.

Re:DOS

[Kooglebot]

What about the FDAPM utility for FreeDOS? It's pretty basic, but can blank the screen, put the machine in "sleep" mode, etc.

Re:DOS

[pipatron]

No, you use it because it writes assembly faster than you, 100% of the time. Ever since the first compilers came out, people have been claiming that it makes faster code without having any clue, and without backing it up.

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

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:DOS

[couchslug]

There are a variety of USB drivers for DOS.

The "Disk Operating System" (so named to keep the Win9x noobs in their proper forums) section of the computing.net forums has plenty of info for the searching.

http://www.computing.net/dos/wwwboard/wwwboard.html

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.

Re:DOS

[Warbothong]

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).

Re:DOS

[msuarezalvarez]

That it was written in assembly directly means that it is unbelievably fast only if the person writing the assembly can do, say, global register allocation optimization in his head...

While there are tasks for which hand-coded assembly really is faster, those are very special tasks. A complete OS is not one of them.

Re:DOS

[Wainamoinen]

Also a quite stable, with small footprint and nice-looking is MenuetOS.

http://www.menuetos.net/

- Pre-emptive multitasking with 1000hz scheduler, multithreading, ring-3 protection
- Responsive GUI with resolutions up to 1280x1024, 16 million colours
- Free-form, transparent and skinnable application windows, drag'n drop
- IDE: Editor/Assembler for applications
- USB 2.0 Hi-speed storage, webcam and printer support
- TCP/IP stack with Loopback Ethernet drivers
- Email/ftp/http/chess clients and ftp/mp3/http servers
- Hard real-time data fetch
- Fits on a single floppy

Re:DOS

[usasma]

Yep, DOS would be it for me also

Re:DOS

[Kooglebot]

It's true that there are USB drivers available for DOS -- but which ones can be obtained legally? DUSE and USBASPI are not freely distributable as far as I know -- USBASPI seems to have been written by Panasonic and distributed with their own hardware. A number of posters on www.computering.net seemed to imply that they are quite scarce as well (which would figure). As I said, non-free (as in freedom, and as in beer), and hard-to-find. Can any of these drivers be obtained and used legally?

Re:DOS

[Alain Williams]

And use a copy of microemacs -- works under MS-DOS as well as *nix

Re:DOS

[Anonymous Coward]

You must be a kid. When I was younger, I used to be amazed at how much the old demoscene groups could push a 286 or 386 to do. All because they were writing pure, optimised assembly code.

Have a look at the 512 byte, 1k, 4k and 64k demos on pouet.net sometime. You can't do that kind of optimisation without pure assembly.

Re:DOS

[mariushm]

Better yet, how about FreeDOS?

Re:DOS

[mariushm]

He needs the laptop running a light OS just to input some text in the laptop from time to time.

Battery won't be drained in 5 minutes, and would probably last longer simply because the video card is running in text mode, no wifi, usb and other drivers loaded (maybe those devices arent even enabled)

Re:DOS

[multipartmixed]

Actually, there are a couple of other advances to hand-coded assembler: reduced code volume, reduced complexity, and reduced feature/scope creep.

Not because hand-coded assembly is faster, mind you... just because it's less typing to write small OSes than big ones.

Re:DOS

[celle]

There's also MenuetOS.

http://www.menuetos.net/index.htm

Re:DOS

[shiftless]

FreeDOS does in fact support power management. It doesn't really matter anyways; we're talking about booting up the laptop quickly, jotting some stuff down, then turning it back off again.

Re:DOS

[shiftless]

I wasn't joking, but thanks for posting, I'll have to give that one a try

Re:DOS

[couchslug]

"Can any of these drivers be obtained and used legally?"

I doubt it, and for folks who care that much the best solution is to ditch proprietary DOS and switch to something better such as Linux.

I'd just download the drivers. Those providing them surely know that, like boot floppy images of yore, they will be used for more than the intended purpose.

Re:DOS

[Koiu Lpoi]

I use Eset Nod32, and, with the latest updates, it comes up with zero infected files. Maybe you should post the names of the infected files, or scan them with an aggregate scanner.

Re:DOS

[Whiteox]

How about DOS?
That's what I thought. DOS 6+ or some type of free Dos would be the fastest and easiest way.
I used an old 386 with a dot matrix for stuff like invoices and text but got sick of re-inking the ribbons.
There's some gui text editors around too.
I have an Apple //e with a HD that boots very fast as well into native 80 column mode.
The trick here is to use fast old hardware and stripped down OS.

Re:DOS

[wyattstafford1]

my av detected Small.AEK when I looked at the download. are you saying this is a false detect and it is not harmful?

Re:DOS

[kEnder242]

If DOS will work, how about EFI?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extensible_Firmware_Interface#The_EFI_shell

Boots fast (part of BIOS), usb, fat16, "portable" if you can find a laptop with it.

Re:DOS

[SgtChaireBourne]

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

The other way to say this is that the CPU(s) and fan will run as hard as they can the whole time the system is running in memory.

Re:DOS

[yurigoul]

DOS + WP5.1 Ah, that brings back memories

Re:DOS

[m50d]

I found that running DOS on a laptop actually increased the battery life, because the hard drive span down completely and was never used - it's a lot easier to run DOS entirely from memory than anything else.

Re:DOS

[Hal_Porter]

It's true that there are USB drivers available for DOS -- but which ones can be obtained legally? DUSE and USBASPI are not freely distributable as far as I know -- USBASPI seems to have been written by Panasonic and distributed with their own hardware. A number of posters on www.computering.net seemed to imply that they are quite scarce as well (which would figure).

As I said, non-free (as in freedom, and as in beer), and hard-to-find. Can any of these drivers be obtained and used legally?

You could write one in assembler in a few weeks.

Re:DOS

[Mateo_LeFou]

Actually, I assumed nothing. I tried it and found it to be TEH BLAZORINGS FAAASSSTTTT!!!111

Re:DOS

[TrentTheThief]

Have a boot floppy ready? I honestly can't remember the last system I owned that even had a floppy drive.

Re:DOS

[Anonymous Coward]

FreeDOS is not quite the old DOS you are thinking about.

http://www.freedos.org/freedos/news/technote/190.html

Re:DOS

[shiftless]

For me, it was Professional Write! Nothing like DOS word processing. The software has menu systems that are much easier/simpler to use than something like vi/emacs, yet being console-based, it's a lot easier to concentrate on what you're doing (writing) rather than having to tune out all the extraneous crap on your screen that comes with having a GUI.

Re:DOS

[yurigoul]

Exactly! If I would ever take up professional writing again I would opt for something without GUI. There are some programs that give you a full screen writing experience - even with green text on black if that is your thing - but somehow it is not the same. You know there are other programs behind that black overlay and so my mind tends to wander off ... are there new emails?

Re:DOS

[exp(pi*sqrt(163))]

> You could write one in assembler in a few weeks.

I can see why you got a job PORTing Hardware Abstraction Layers.

Re:DOS

[Hal_Porter]

You are the first person to understand my user name.

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:pico

[init100]

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.

Re:pico

[BrokenSegue]

Not to be pedantic, but not *all* the key commands are at the bottom. Not nearly. Hit ^G to see the real listing of commands (including lots of useful ones not listed at the bottom of the screen). But yes, nano is nice (and pico on sensible machines is just a symlink to nano).

Re:pico

[Hatta]

Really? For me the time to start up X is less than half the time to get a command prompt after GRUB. It's almost negligible in terms of the entire startup sequence. Not starting X is a good start, but you'll need to hack on your init scripts if you really want a fast boot.

I recommend

[i_liek_turtles]

Windows Vista Ultimate. Just get a sharpie and write on the screen.

Re:I recommend

[smittyoneeach]

Because shaking the etch-a-sketch is, you know, too hard. ;)

Re:I recommend

[ismism]

Brilliant! You can practice tolerance for OS bloat/crapware while writing!

Re:I recommend

[i_liek_turtles]

The boot time for an etch-a-sketch is deplorable.

Re:I recommend

[dataninja]

Just the way Bill intended Vista to work.

Freedos?

[Pathwalker]

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.

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.

Re:Freedos?

[i_liek_turtles]

EMACS is an OS, you insensitive clod!

Re:Freedos?

[zakezuke]

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.

Re:Freedos?

[shiftless]

Yes, it is fast. We're talking practically instantaneous command prompt as soon as the BIOS screens are passed. You might have a bunch of TSRs and drivers loading in your startup files that will slow it down, but you can set up a startup menu to select which configuration to boot, or bypass the startup files altogether.

Re:Freedos?

[pipatron]

Most editors I've worked with does this, even CED on my Amiga. UltraEdit for Windows, vim for linux, etc.

Probably one from Stalman

[DoofusOfDeath]

"What is the fastest booting operating system out there that is still sufficient for editing text?

I'd say Stallman's first OS:

doofus@hotdog:~$ time emacs -nw

real 0m2.075s
user 0m0.372s
sys 0m0.076s
doofus@hotdog:~$

Re:Probably one from Stalman

[harry666t]

He said: sufficient for editing text

*ducks* :D

BTW, porting emacs to bare x86 metal sounds like a really nice idea...

Re:Probably one from Stalman

[harry666t]

I know, I kid. Emacs default editor&keybindings (+ some custom modifications) is the only editor around that I like. Python-mode rocks for hacking in my language of choice (:

DOS.

[FlyByPC]

DOS Edit does a good job at basic text editing -- and on any reasonably modern laptop, DOS should boot amazingly quickly.

If that's not fast enough for you, a TRS-80 Model 100 might do. They boot nearly instantly and have a built-in text editor. (The 32K max memory capacity might be a bit limiting, though.)

Re:DOS.

[7 digits]

My TRS-80 Model 100 is awesome (not that the model 200 have a much bigger screen).

But the poster will be pretty disapointed if he tries to read fat32 usb drive with that...

Re:DOS.

[FlyByPC]

Yeah, yeah. If you want to drag your files kicking and screaming into the 1990s, you could go with an HP Jornada. They boot nearly instantly and run Windows CE. The keyboard's way too small, but otherwise they're cute.

Re:DOS.

[zakezuke]

If that's not fast enough for you, a TRS-80 Model 100 might do. They boot nearly instantly and have a built-in text editor. (The 32K max memory capacity might be a bit limiting, though.)

The good old TRS-80 portables. I remember there being an issue attaching an external modem. I know I had a 14.4k supra that for some reason the screen dimmed when I actually tried to use it, and I'm sure that the laptop couldn't deal with the the max speed the modem provided.

I'm not saying the TRS-80 isn't a good solution, far from it, just data interchange is a bit of a pain.

The last time I sort of dealt with one, I seem to remember that I needed to format the disks, but the software was on a disk that had since become corrupted. Not that one would want to use floppies to exchange data these days.

Re:DOS.

[jonbryce]

My iPAQ takes about 40 seconds to boot to the password screen, and about 55 seconds in total before I can use it.

Of course I generally don't have to reboot it, and MS Word starts almost instantly.

Re:DOS.

[Ortega-Starfire]

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/

Re:DOS.

[innocent_white_lamb]

I downloaded that from the MS website some years ago. I've tried to use it with DOSEMU on Linux (which runs most DOS software amazingly well) but found that it (Word 5.5) won't save files onto my hard drive. It checks to insure that you have sufficient free space on the drive to save the file and gets an answer that overflows the variable it's using so it thinks there is insufficient space and refuses to save a file.
 
I remember seeing a TSR program back when "huge" 40mb hard drives first came out (remember the Seagate ST250 that sounded like gravel being rolled in a pail when it was in use) that would fake the return from the DOS interrupt that tells you how much free space you have so programs wouldn't do that, but I haven't found it again.

Re:DOS.

[ModernGeek]

Only on slashdot would somebody mention the idea of carrying around a TRS-80 Model 100 as a solution to jotting down electronic notes on the go, much less get modded up for it. I think a PDA or such would be more practical, or just letting the laptop sleep/hibernate for near "instant-on" functionality.

Re:DOS.

[vlpronj]

There's devices like the AlphaSmart, by Neo, whic some writers use. Made to be sturdy enough for school children, but last for a long, long time one set of batteries, and hook to a PC via USB (for most models). Boots up in roughly 1 second. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlphaSmart http://www.google.com/products?hl=en&safe=off&rls=com.microsoft:*:IE-SearchBox&rlz=1I7HPNN&resnum=0&q=alphasmart&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=X&oi=product_result_group&resnum=4&ct=title

Smartphone?

[meta-monkey]

Aren't you more likely to have your cellphone in your pocket than be lugging around a laptop? I just jot notes on my iPhone.

Re:Smartphone?

[DaVince21]

There's no real "lugging" if it's something like an Eee PC though. (By the way, these boot up in 10-15 seconds when using its default crappy Linux OS.)

Re:Smartphone?

[Matheus]

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 ;)

Re:Smartphone?

[KillerBob]

Or have a cell phone which takes voice memos... Mine will record literally hours of voice memo with just the 20mb or so that's left on the 1GB SD card.

But perhaps the guy who submitted the question has a reason for wanting something to actually write the notes on. Possibly he wants to use it during meetings, where he can't speak?

Re:Smartphone?

[Anonymous Coward]

I had an iPhone that I bought and a Motorola Q that my work bought me. I can say that as a geek teh Q was light years ahaed of the iPhone. I am sure that the average consumer would prefer the iPhone but for a geek, the Q is way better. Hell. I was just at jiffylube getting my oil changed and I was using PuTTY on my Q to connect to out AIX servers to make sure everything is OK. A real life QWERTY keyboard is awesome. A touchepad is cool for squares but from a geek, a physical touchpad is essential.

Re:Smartphone?

[fermion]

I agree. A smart phone is perfect for short notes. Any full computer is overkill. OTOH, there used to be mid priced and mid sized devices for such things, especially for longer notes

In the old days I had my tandy 100 or 200, which I used extensively. Then there was the newton with an external keyboard. Transfer was over ethernet. Now when I want something small I have to carry around my old 12" powerbook, which is ready in about 10 seconds, but a bit of an overkill for short notes. I suppose that one of the new ULPC, or perhaps a very small not so ULPC, would do the trick. For instance a MacBook Air should wake up in much less than 10 seconds. I don't what an eee pc with linux would do.

Re:Smartphone?

[Phroggy]

Does it clip to your belt? If not, you have to lug it.

Re:Smartphone?

[jamesh]

That reminds me of another idea - a dictaphone. I think most PDA's and probably phones too these days can record audio. If not, just call your voicemail and leave a message :)

fast boot editor

[Uomograsso]

Psion series 3

Needlessly Limiting the Field

[shaitand]

I don't know if all of E-Macs would be loadable in the limited time frames you are talking about but VI certainly could.

If you press 'i' after you load VI you will experienced a notepad like editing experience that couldn't be easier. When you are done just press esc then x to save and exit or q! to exit without saving. when you see q! think, "quit damnit".

Re:Needlessly Limiting the Field

[Waffle Iron]

Actually, it's :x<Enter> or :q!<Enter> to quit. I tend to use the equivalent shortcuts ZZ or ZQ instead.

Re:Needlessly Limiting the Field

[phyreskull]

If you press 'i' after you load VI you will experienced a notepad-like editing experience that couldn't be easier. When you are done just press esc then type :x to save and exit or :q! to exit without saving. When you see q! think, "quit damnit".

There, fixed that for you.

Re:Needlessly Limiting the Field

[KillerBob]

... and people wonder why programs like Pico/Nano are more popular....

And you get no geek cred for using vi instead. Real hardcore geeks use ed.

Maybe try non-x86 hardware

[BLAG-blast]

When the Apple TiBook first came out (before the days MacOSX), I got one and installed PPC linux on it. I was always amazed by how quickly it booted, around 20seconds. Of course, if you're also running XP, this probably won't work for you...

Four minutes?

[reboot246]

Sometimes it takes me longer than that to find a pen or pencil!

How about...

[BobSixtyFour]

a typewriter?

Re:How about...

[wootest]

The email client just isn't there, and the web browser is just barely better than IE7.

Sleep a macbook

[presidenteloco]

Point 1: Sleep and wake actually works on MacOS/X
(and doesn't make you log in again)

Point 2. You get a mac!

Re:Sleep a macbook

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Sleep a macbook

[Tim Browse]

Well, I just tried this on my vanilla MacBook. Leaving an instance of TextEdit open, I put it to sleep. Then I opened the lid and tried typing.

Time for text to appear in TextEdit? Less than 3 seconds from when the magentic lid catch separated.

I've never seen a Windows laptop do that. I usually have a working wireless connection in less than 8-10 seconds too. That took at least 30 seconds on the last Windows laptop I tried (same base station).

I use PCs and Macs btw, but this is one of those things that Macs just seem to do way better, probably due to Apple's ability to control the hardware. Windows has to deal with whatever random collection of chips you have on your motherboard, etc.

Re:Sleep a macbook

[ArsonSmith]

I feel the pain of no mac now. My previous employer gave us all Macs. At the end of the day I would see what time it was, close the lid unplug it and go home. When I got home I would open it, and within a few seconds be right were I was when I left. I do the same in the morning to head back to work. My new employer has given me this damn Peecee which seems to be a total crap shoot if it'll actually resume or not. Sometimes it'll work fine, sometimes the USB keyboard/mouse wont work, sometimes it'll come back but wont connect to a network, sometimes all the application windows will just be a nice pretty consistent shade of gray. I moved from a linux laptop back before it was even an option to susspend so I just never did, to a Mac laptop that worked perfectly every time, to a windows laptop that seems to worked maybe 20% of the time. I've given up and just shutdown every night now.

Re:Sleep a macbook

[nxtw]

I've never seen a Windows laptop do that. I usually have a working wireless connection in less than 8-10 seconds too. That took at least 30 seconds on the last Windows laptop I tried (same base station).

I use PCs and Macs btw, but this is one of those things that Macs just seem to do way better, probably due to Apple's ability to control the hardware. Windows has to deal with whatever random collection of chips you have on your motherboard, etc.

Takes about 2 seconds for me on a PC Intel ICH7M/945GML laptop running Windows. This is the same chipset used by the first Intel Mac laptops. The Intel mobile chipsets in most Macs are the most popular PC laptop chipsets as well.

Wireless takes 5-15 seconds to come back up, depending on the last time I authenticated to the network (WPA2 PEAP or TLS).

Re:Sleep a macbook

[Tim Browse]

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.

Re:Sleep a macbook

[nxtw]

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.

Re:Sleep a macbook

[vivek7006]

windows laptop that seems to worked maybe 20%

That is a lie, Sir. Suspend to RAM works in windows. It has always worked in windows since XP days. It works flawlessly. Either you are lying or your windows laptop is an old piece of shit

Re:Sleep a macbook

[fluch]

But this way you get to buy yet another computer!

Ehem ... nope, I don't need to buy an other computer.

Re:Sleep a macbook

[ArsonSmith]

yea, it works flawlessly about 20% of the time. Put down the koolaid and back away.

Re:Sleep a macbook

[chis101]

I have 4 year old laptop computer (not really so much a laptop, it's a 17"), a Clevo D470k, that is running Windows XP SP2. Sleep works flawlessly 80% of the time, USB doesn't work 5% of the time, and 10% of the time it just never wakes up.

I have never successfully woken this computer from sleep while running Ubuntu.

So, I'm not happy with Sleep on either of these operating systems, which leads me to blame the hardware, not the OS. Perhaps this is what you should be doing too.

Fast Booting Text-editor Operating System?

[Bailsoft]

Graphite HP works for me!

Re:Fast Booting Text-editor Operating System?

[Trahald]

Graphite HP works for me!

I prefer a Graphite 2B.

nethack linux

[acon1modm]

http://www.crash-override.net/nethacklinuxdownload.html

boots from a floppy.

0) generate character
1) find magic marker
2) scribble on the floor

MacOSX

[arikol]

doesn't boot any faster than the others but the Sleep mode works properly there. Shut the lid when finished, open lid for doing stuffþ 5 seconds later (or less) you can start working. Win has not been reliable in sleep mode (don't know if Vista has gotten its act together on that front) and as much as I love Ubuntu it does have some downsides on notebooks (being fixed as we speak but still a bit of work to do)

Re:MacOSX

[TargetBoy]

I use sleep mode all the time on windows XP with my Inspiron 9400. I've never had a problem with it.

Re:MacOSX

[speedtux]

but the Sleep mode works properly [on MacOSX]

I bought a MacBook originally because that was important to me in a laptop, and I thought that Apple at least got this right since they control both the hardware and the software.

It didn't work. Every now and then, when closing the lid, the MacBook doesn't sleep, it gets incredibly hot and the battery runs out. Other people have the same problem.

Don't believe me? Check Google:

http://www.google.com/search?q=macbook+sleep+problems

Re:MacOSX

[arikol]

Didn't see your comment there, that sucks! Hmmm, I see what you mean. If the battery runs out it should write the contents of RAM to disk (hibernate) so you shouldn't lose any work. The XP problem has been unreliability on wakeup and complete loss of any documents that were open/unsaved. Depending on hardware configurations. Some configs work perfectly, another model from the same manufacturer may not work at all.

Arch Linux

[Bryan Ischo]

I dabbled in Arch Linux a bit a while back. I was booting it off of a USB flash drive (one of the slow cheap ones, not one of the fast new ones) and I am pretty sure it booted in less than 20 seconds. Of course, I had to patch their bootup scripts myself to have it boot that fast, because they had some dumb logic that was waiting a fixed period of time for detected usb devices to show up, rather than polling and exiting the wait loop when the devices were there. So whereas it would always take 10 or 15 seconds (whatever you had configured it to) with their scripts, my change allowed my system to usually wait only a few seconds. Net result, the thing booted pretty quickly. Of course, I submitted a patch to them, and they have done nothing with it, or the bug I opened for the issue, so that put me off Arch Linux pretty quick.

Anyway, there were alot of nice things about Arch Linux; it is vastly streamlined compared to normal Linux. And if you know what you are doing, you can definitely get it under the 20 second boot time with just a little tweaking. Then you have a full-fledged Linux system to work on instead of some hacked together boot/root disks or whatever.

Re:Arch Linux

[Bryan Ischo]

I am a good citizen, I submitted the patch in the Arch Linux bug database, you can find it at:

http://bugs.archlinux.org/task/10483

Hibernate. Or get a phone with a notes function.

[NevermindPhreak]

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.

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.

Re:Just suspend

[Quiet_Desperation]

I had the same thought. My old Powerbook G4 turns on near instantly from sleep. I only reboots it for system updates. Keep something like BBEdit loaded and open on the screen, and there ya go.

Re:Just suspend

[jamesh]

I couldn't agree more - my Windows XP laptop gets booted for 3 reasons:
1. Windows updates - only the critical ones
2. runs out of 16 bit handles - I still use a 16 bit app and after about 30-60 days something goes wrong and it runs out of 16 bit handles
3. It crashes - this hasn't happened in the last 12 months. Before that it seemed to happen once a month or so but a chkdsk cleared that up.

ARM Linux board

[EmbeddedJanitor]

Many of these will boot in less than 3 sec to a command console.

Re:ARM Linux board

[harry666t]

What is the best place to get these? How much do they cost? How powerful and how flexible they are?

Re:ARM Linux board

[EmbeddedJanitor]

There are many places that sells them. Google for "ARM Linux board" and you'll find many.

Cost is variable depending on what you want.

There's also a wide range of power and flexibility too.

Heh - I thought TFA was going to be a faster emacs

[multipartmixed]

That said, if i really cared to have a text-editor-capable OS boot quickly, _and_ it needed FAT32.

Hmm.

Is VFAT close enough for ya? Win98 boot disk transmuted onto a USB dongle with the VFAT driver in the config.sys. Boot only to command.com, not the full OS.

It'll probably take longer for your box to POST than to boot that puppy.

Me, I just write shit on my hand with a sharpie.

Use a DS?

[Chris Pimlott]

Resume on a DS is practically instantaneous, at least for commercial titles, and there's a lively homebrew scene, maybe there's already something out there that might work out for you? Plus very portable and easy to scribble with the touchscreen, and great battery life.

Oh, and games too :)

Re:Use a DS?

[i.of.the.storm]

This is actually a pretty good suggestion, the resume basically is isntantaneous. If you want to take notes on it you will have to get a homebrew cart. The main problem with this though is that the screen is really quite small for stuff like this, I tried it for a while but it just doesn't work. I would actually recommend a smartphone with QWERTY keyboard for this guy, seems like it'd be the best solution.

Re:Use a DS?

[ZzzzSleep]

Couldn't you just use Pictochat, with nobody else connected, instead of a custom cart?

Re:Use a DS?

[i.of.the.storm]

You could, but that would leave the wifi on and waste battery faster than normal. Also then it's annoying because transferring stuff off of it means just copyings things down somewhere else, rather than just copying a text file or something.

Re:Hibernate mode

[PakProtector]

I recommend a solution of hydrocyanic acid.

Next question.

remove gdm from startup

[nevurthls]

run sysv-rc-conf, remove gdm BOOM 30 seconds off of your ubuntu boot time and ready to edit with vi/pico/nano, etc. How hard was that?

60 seconds is fast enough

[mapleneckblues]

It takes a normal person more than 60 seconds on an average to search all of his/her pockets and bags and for a ballpoint pen before he/she realizes that another one has disappeared.

Apple II

[Jon Abbott]

It boots into Appleworks in ten seconds flat. 'Nuff said.

Re:Apple II

[multipartmixed]

I seem to recall it taking longer than that to boot into ProDOS, which IIRC is required for Appleworks.

Those old floppies were not spectacularly fast...

] PR#6

Grriiininininninin groainnnnnginginrrrrinnggngnginn akakakakak

PDA

[Ahmeni]

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.

Atari Portfolio

[orkysoft]

Seriously, get it on eBay for a few bucks.

It's smaller than a netbook, and runs on 3xAA batteries (lasts 2-3 weeks on them!), and it boots in a second.

It runs a DOS 2.11 clone, and comes complete with a simple and easy to use editor and a spreadsheet and some other stuff.

It doesn't come with USB, but can do nullmodem transfers with a serial port attachment. For added ease of use, buy one with a CompactFlash reader built in (there is someone who modifies them for this purpose).

Seriously, if all you want to do is quick notetaking, this is your ideal tool.

(For added geek value, it comes with a 8088 CPU made by OKI and can run most DOS programs that use proper BIOS and DOS calls instead of the faster tricks from that era. This is because the hardware isn't actually IBM compatible, but the BIOS provides the compatibility layer, so programs which circumvent the BIOS and attempt to address the hardware directly will not run.)

MenuetOS

[mustafap]

www.menuetos.org

Both 64 and 32 bit versions.

I think you'll find that boots *Very* fast.

Re:MenuetOS

[Whiteox]

That looks too good to be true!
Thanks for the link.

DeadMini?

[CyrusOmega]

I haven't personally tried it but from this about DeadMini http://linux.softpedia.com/get/System/Operating-Systems/Linux-Distributions/DeadMini-11601.shtml might have something you can use...

"The main advantage is that it boots anywhere - wherever you can stick the files, use something like syslinux or isolinux to make it boot - and of course make bios boot the medium - it will boot without a trouble. This is because the whole system (currently 5MB, including booting overhead) is copied in RAM without the need to seek the source device. It also boots very fast - minimal bootup time is about 3s (further testing will be done)."

Buy more pencils and paper?

[popmaker]

"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.

Neo by alphasmart

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Neo by alphasmart

[mmatti]

... and for about $50 you can pick up its predecessor, the AlphaSmart 3000, on eBay. Aside from instant-on, it's damn near indestructible. No USB drive, but a USB connection lets it dump its text to any app by appearing to be a keyboard -- a slick trick that lets it offload to anything. And the 700 hour battery life is simply insane. Heavy users have to reload their AA batteries once every ... year.

Re:Neo by alphasmart

[novakyu]

Affordable. Only $219 a new lower price and a fraction of the cost of a standard laptop

Well, my laptop cost only a fraction of the cost of a mainframe, but I haven't heard that used as a selling point.

You can't compare an apple to a whole fruit basket and say that an apple costs only $10 while the fruit basket costs $30, and therefore it is cheap.

This thing seems to cost a gigantic $219 (more than lower end PDAs, which can do far more than what this can do!) for what is essentially a glorified typewriter.

Re:Neo by alphasmart

[Sporkinum]

I concur. Wife has one and is a light user. Still on the same set of batteries for 2 years. There is no formatting, other than carriage returns I think. Like he mentioned about dumping text. Pc thinks it's a keyboard, so you hit like 1 button, and it dumps text into what ever window/app is open. Also, I'd guess it works with any OS. Works fine in Linux or windows. Command line or GUI. Even has a spell checker built in.

Get a Macbook.

[doghouse41]

Why do you want to have a computer that you have to boot from cold?

My MacBook wakes from sleep in a couple of seconds. A couple more to log in. It will stay in sleep for days on a fully charged battery.

When I do reboot, I'm pretty sure that MaxOS X comes up to usable in less than 60s (not that I have timed it) Of course I probably reboot less than once a week anyway.

Easy - a PDA

[MrFenty]

I use a PDA (HTC X7500) which is also a phone. It has a 5 inch screen, runs Win Mobile 6.1 and is effectively a small laptop (e.g. Word, Excel, internet) and as it is always on basically doesn't have a boot time.

It syncs with my PC via USB, so downloading my notes onto the main PC is a snap. The phone part is a bit crap, and I look like an idiot holding this brick up to my ear, but that aside I couldn't live without it, and it is ideal for that sort of very quick / brief notetaking that you describe.

More friendly than emacs????

[jwiegley]

Not possible. Emacs is not only your friend, it's your faithful slave.

eee pc or slashtop

[vajorie]

eeepc (701) boots in about 20 seconds. a laptop with slashtop boots in about 5 seconds I think (from there, you could use google's notepad).

Don't boot... wake from sleep.

[agristin]

Don't boot.

I have had a mac notebook (okay a couple different notebooks) for about 10 years for just that type of thing.

I don't boot, I just let it sleep all the time. It sleeps for days. When I need it, open, wake, login. I require login from wake but you could speed it up by not requiring the security, and then text edit.

OS X wakes from sleep, login, and start vi-ing in under 10 seconds on my current MacBook, the stop watch test just did 7 sec (closed, slept, then timed waking and continuing this post). And it is pretty reliable. The only thing that has ruined that reliability is sleeping virtualized servers in VmWare or Parallels, then sometimes it takes longer.

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.

Netbook?

[minus9]

My Acer Aspire One boots to GUI in 14 seconds, the keyboards not bad either for a Netbook, it's even quicker if you just suspend rather than shutdown.

Re:Netbook?

[sean23007]

Agreed. I never shut down my Aspire One and it boots up in just a few seconds. It runs a full Linux OS, and it doesn't take long to fire up a terminal window with vim or a GUI text editor, I guess. (Or you could just leave OpenOffice open all the time, so you wouldn't have to wait for it to start up every time you open the screen.)

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:Just to jot things down?

[NotQuiteReal]

I use the same thing!

Unfortunately, the native font is pretty much write-only, I think I am writing down brilliant and important things, but after a few hours I can't read it anymore.

My 3rd grade cursive teacher is spinning in her grave.

Re:Just to jot things down?

[johndmartiniii]

Agreed. Between this and post-its, I'm doing pretty good these days. The boot-time for post-it is even less than for the notepad.

Re:Just to jot things down?

[Frank Grimes]

I used to carry one of those little spiral notebooks in my pocket, but the spirals always got squashed. Now I carry a Moleskine. It's a lot more rugged.

Re:Just to jot things down?

[iabervon]

Pen and paper is really quick, but it's a lousy text editor. I make notes for myself on chopstick wrappers on my desk, and I keep trying to copy text from them to other windows by pointing the mouse pointer at them and selecting the text, and it never works.

You may be using the wrong tool

[theurge14]

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.

Re:You may be using the wrong tool

[rvw]

I use my iPod Touch frequently to make small notes. I can email these to myself, then use them elsewhere. The standard Notes app is sufficient for this. The real nice thing is that you can do this anywhere, with one hand. The only problem is that the original question mentioned USB-support.

I used to have a Psion MX5. I really liked it, although the screen was problematic (easily broken). The keyboard was fantastic, and you could blind type with it at about half of normal speed.

I'm still waiting for a device that is that small, has good quality keyboard, and long battery life, lasting for 10+ hours.

Why boot at all?

[Archimonde]

On a macbook you can have OSX suspended all the time. Just open the laptop's lid and the OS will resume instantly. You don't even have to press a key to resume it. And of course, no need to boot it. Actually, the only time I get my macbook restarted is after software patches.

I really don't get why other laptops don't have this feature*, because it works great and it is such a pleasure to use it.

As a sidenote, is OS boot time really such an important thing? Lets look a the a mobile phone for example. Nobody cares how much it takes it to boot. When you have it on "standby" you just press a combination of buttons and your phone is ready to use. I still don't get why don't we have computers who have better suspend modes etc.

*they can suspend/hibernate when you close the lid, but never resume automatically after you open the lid.

Re:Why boot at all?

[Shados]

I agree. Vista's shutdown button defaults to "Sleep", which is the same thing as the suspend you describe. Once you start using it, you don't look back. Well, unless then 50 cents a month in electricity that it costs is a big deal to you :)

Linux is best

[FudRucker]

providing you get an old school distro, (Arch, Crux or Slackware) and build a tickless kernel with a Timer Frequency of 1000Hz & pre-empt. i have Slackware 12.1 booting very quickly and the response is quite snappy...

Typewriter...? I remember them!

[WillKemp]

Strewth! It's a long time since i saw one of those. I wonder if there's people around here who've never seen one...

Re:Typewriter...? I remember them!

[owlstead]

"Strewth! It's a long time since i saw one of those. I wonder if there's people around here who've never seen one..."

I don't. It's a fair guess that blind people and/or babies would never have seen one, with a small percentage of exceptions.

try splashtop

[bzuro]

http://splashtop.com/ 5 second to boot. by default, its on the hard drive, but i saw a guy boot it from usb flash. it is worth a look.

Re:try splashtop

[Maxmin]

+1

2-3 seconds on a fast machine. more features than the OP is asking for, but it's both nifty and handy.

Our reflectometer works with a DOS PC

[blind biker]

Last Friday I was using our reflectometer and was impressed by the fact that the PC that controls it boots in about 6 seconds directly into the application! It's based on DOS and the PC is a .... 33MHz Intel 386! It would be cool if a contemporary PC based on a 3GHz CPU could boot into such an application in 0.06 seconds. I know, I/O is the main bottleneck, I guess, though hard disks have indeed gotten about 100 times faster in data transfer, and about 5 times faster in seek time, since the 386 was the hotness.

Re:Our reflectometer works with a DOS PC

[orkysoft]

It still takes a few seconds for a harddisk to spin up, and for the PC to run through the BIOS startup routine.

To get around these issues, you'd need flash memory and sleep mode => Asus EEE pc for example.

Re:Our reflectometer works with a DOS PC

[rvw]

If you put the Asus EEE in sleep mode, the battery runs empty. After several hours, it's empty!

Re:Our reflectometer works with a DOS PC

[orkysoft]

I didn't know that. How many hours are we talking about here?

Re:Our reflectometer works with a DOS PC

[ecloud]

You could try Linux BIOS but then the hardware choices are kindof restricted.

Re:Our reflectometer works with a DOS PC

[cerberusss]

Quote from teh googles: "Iâ(TM)m running the default Xandros OS, and whenever I put the Eee to sleep, it would eat up about 10% of the batteryâ(TM)s remaining capacity every two hours."

BeOS

[dzfoo]

BeOS boots extremely fast (I seem to recall something like 5 to 10 seconds). And, of course, it comes with a standard text editor.

I'm not sure if you can get a copy any more, though.

        -dZ.

Re:BeOS

[IL-CSIXTY4]

I was hoping someone would recommend BeOS! Its successor is an open source OS called Haiku.

Re:BeOS

[Fallingcow]

I'm fairly sure you can *ahem* get a copy somewhere. If not, then my tears shall come forth in torrents.

And yes, it is fast as hell. Also great as a media player; Windows and Linux on a dual-core processor w/ 1GB or more of RAM still manage to stutter or have minor distortions in media playback if I do anything else at all with my computer while it's playing, but in my experience MP3 playback in BeOS on a Pentium 133 w/ 64MB ram WILL NOT STUTTER even if you abuse the shit out of it. On machines that would have trouble sharing time between WinAmp and ICQ under Win98, BeOS would remain relatively responsive under much larger loads.

QNX also used to be pretty good about that, though it's not as user friendly as BeOS. Another fast-booter, too.

Re:BeOS

[michaewlewis]

I was hoping someone would bring up beos, too. I did a search for beos on this page as soon as I opened it.... Definitely my recommendation as well. I was running beos on a 700mhz system with 512mb ram and it was completely ready for action in about 20-25 seconds from hitting the power button. And that's not trying to resume from hibernate or sleep, either.

Try Syllable

[Anonymous Coward]

Hi,

My name is Rick Caudill and I work on the Syllable project. I would say you should give Syllable(www.syllable.org) a try. My machine boots to a gui within 10 seconds. Just give it a try

MS-DOS

[Dwedit]

I think MS-DOS (or a variant) is the answer. It should boot almost instantly.
Even though you get the 8.3 filename limitation, you have DOS Edit or QBasic to edit text files.

EPOC

[D4C5CE]

EPOC: Instant-on for years after first boot, best served in an E Ink reincarnation of the Psion (to be developed)...

FreeBSD

[xoundmind]

Especially with a slimmed down kernel, it smokes anything else I've used.
However, does it really matter?

not necessarily important Re:DOS

[damn_registrars]

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.

it's so simple!

[Sentry21]

boot linux init=/usr/bin/tee /notes.txt

Done!

A notebook...

[teal_]

A notebook boots in 2 seconds. You just open it to a blank page, uncap your pen, and voila, the perfect text editor. Plus, you can draw figures without any special software.

Re:A notebook...

[Geminii]

Not to mention the amazing power-saving software. I bought mine last year and I've never had to charge or replace the battery even once!

Tandy 102

[Anonymous Coward]

Instant-on, portable, full keyboard, and uses 4 AA batteries. No need to wait 20 seconds... sheesh.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80_Model_100_line

This chap has how to hitch it up to Linux or Xbox and whatnot.
http://www.planetnz.com/palmheads/tandy.php

Re:Tandy 102

[rvw]

The Dana seems more useful!

Re:Tandy 102

[autophile]

(sigh, too easy) There is no Dana, only Zuul.

4 minutes?!?

[supernova_hq]

Ok, as much as I hate windows (only use it for gaming at non-wine-able stuff), you SHOULD be able to boot XP in about 30 seconds if you take all the crapware out. Unless you use a stripped down linux (command line only), you should still be able to get it to boot in less than a minute. Well, maybe not Vista...

I installed one, once...

[ghostis]

A few years ago I followed:

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-lwl1/

over a long weekend. It took about 2.5 days off-and-on to bring it up. You get a hand-compiled linux install with busybox providing all of your tools. The only issue I had was that copied-over binaries worked better if you compiled them against uclibc as well. It was a fun project. One neat trick it taught me was to tar directly to the floppy device. The instructions can probably be adapted to USB media. Once I finished, I build vim and nano against uclibc and copied them over.
If I recall correctly, it was a 486 laptop and most of the boot time was the BIOS setting up. If you can adapt the process to a modern machine, it will do that for which you are asking.

-Adam

Re:PDA

[sohp]

I still have my ancient Visor Platinum. It has a 'boot' time of 0. Perfect for jotting down a few words.

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.

Re:The MIT Lisp Machine's "instaboot" feature

[Hafnia]

Nice post , thanks

Tons

[nurb432]

Just dont boot a GUI with *nix.

PicoBSD

FreeDOS

VsTA

QNX

www.osnews.com

Norton Textra Writer

[fireheadca]

When Norton was still awesome, they came out with Norton Textra Writer.

A Dos-based editor which could check grammer and spelling.

Hipster PDA

[likerice]

For my money, nothing beats the Hipster PDA.

NewtonOS

[sakusha]

On an emate300.

why not single-user mode?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well if you have Ubuntu installed and you just need to edit a txt file then have a grub entry that goes to single user mode, it will just boot the kernel and giv you a bash login prompt

My kernel takes ~1 for control to be passed to init so you can't get much faster then that

Commodore64

[Anonymous Coward]

Instant on! Doesn't get faster than that. OK, so loading a text editor takes 5 minutes, but you asked about boot time.

C= 4 life!

Re:Hibernate. Or get a phone with a notes function

[owlstead]

*If* it works. It still beats me that there are so many relatively new computers that don't want to hibernate. I think selling a computer that does not hibernate or suspends to RAM out of the box is criminal.

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.

Re:Hibernate. Or get a phone with a notes function

[globaljustin]

My laptop boots in about 20-30 seconds, with windows XP

My XP laptop (Toshiba Satellite, 1gig ram) boots in less than 45 seconds

It recovers from hibernate in about 8 seconds

Not sure what the guy who wrote the article description at top is running XP on, but 4 minutes seems ridiculous. Even the slow-ass machines where I work boot XP in less than 2 minutes.

I'd also go with hibernate or use cell phone, b/c it sounds like he's using an underpowered computer

Tons of Linux guys on here have (probably better) suggestions, but if you want to stick w/ XP, hibernate

Re:Heh - I thought TFA was going to be a faster em

[stimpleton]

"Me, I just write shit on my hand with a sharpie."

I do the same, just on my forehead.

It has obviously made me more efficient, as requests for my IT assistance has dropped markedly.

Xubuntu, Custom Debian, Syllable, Haiku

[Qbertino]

From the top of my head:

- (X)Ubuntu with a default XFCE enviroment. Designed for very old computers and people who hate the Gnome/KDE slowpoking.

- Haiku OS. OSS BeOS variant. Lightning fast, designed with the GUI in mind. Sub-10-seconds booting is rumored.

- The Syllable OS. An OSS OS inspired by the proof-of-concept project Athena OS and some concepts implemented in BeOS. This one is actually quite interesting, as they've come quite far for a project that started from scratch without being a simple Unix rippoff. The site has demo videos showing Syllable coldboot into the Desktop under 10 seconds on older hardware and they've got quite a few apps ported to it allready, including a native browser using a pimped-out webkit renderer. Shutdown is sub 5 seconds (also important). They're working on a completely seperate server variant too. I consider this one a truely interesting alternate OS. You should check it out.

- Current Debian with a 2.2 kernel, Fluxbox or Windowmaker VM and a little tweaking should get you a very lightweight OS enviroment aswell.

Take any of the above and flash them onto a modern bios that you plug into your Mobo and your set for super-fast booting.

Re:Xubuntu, Custom Debian, Syllable, Haiku

[christurkel]

Current Debian+Tab Window Manager+nedit.

Zero second boot time.

[cheebie]

There's this amazing device combo called pen-and-paper that is astonishingly good for jotting down a quick note. Zero boot time, no batteries, very light, and costs about $3.

The search capabilities are pretty primitive, but examples have been shown to be still accessible after nearly 2000 years!

Not every problem requires a high tech solution.

Re:Zero second boot time.

[OrangeTide]

A little Moleskine pocket notebook seems to work great. It has a little pocket for storing things, and they are small. They have a integrated bookmark and an elastic band to keep it closed. They are pricey for a notebook (around $10-$15). But it seems like the fastest way to jot down some quick ideas, plus you can draw some quick diagrams. And yes, you can get them ruled, plain, quadruled, and in many other forms.

A small 99 cent wire-wound reporters notepad is equally effective at holding notes and fits in your pocket. And usually you can find a small pencil that will fit inside the wire binding.

DOS sounds like a solution to me.

[OrangeTide]

If all he wants is text editing. I see no problem with loading up vim or emacs on DOS. he can kick it off in autoexec.bat if he wants.

Re:DOS sounds like a solution to me.

[johnkzin]

Except... he said nothing as arcane and unfriendly as vi and emacs. So, suggesting a vi clone and/or emacs is kind of ... inappropriate?

Is pico still out there? I never really liked it, but it is/was supposed to be more user friendly.

Re:DOS sounds like a solution to me.

[johnkzin]

Your definition of arcane (or mine, etc.) is irrelevant.

The relevant defn. of arcane is the OP's.

Re:DOS sounds like a solution to me.

[91degrees]

You search for foo_*, delete it and type *Foo.

You can do that in emacs, or use the search replace function (honestly have no idea why emacs is considered arcane). In vi, you first need to learn how to type something...

Re:DOS sounds like a solution to me.

[OrangeTide]

vi is very Zen. You cannot type until you learn to type.

Pen and Paper

[LunarEffect]

I know the feeling of wanting to urgently write something down. Thats why I always have a pen and a pad as well as my laptop in my backpack with me. I just find a pen and a pad so much more convenient if you want to do more than just write a quick note, like draw a diagram or the likes =)

Re:Hibernate. Or get a phone with a notes function

[InlawBiker]

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.

DS Organize

[phossie]

I really don't have anything bad to say about DS Organize, a homebrew app. As a bonus, it includes a somewhat old-school web browser - but it's much faster than Opera DS. Have fun getting your hands on a homebrew cartridge these days though. Grr. And when you find a seller, do your homework first. R4 is a good cartridge. I and everyone I know has been very happy with it.

Re:DS Organize

[Jesus_666]

Have fun getting your hands on a homebrew cartridge these days though.

Amazon? amazon.com doesn't seem to have them but the German one has, for example, a CycloDS Evolution with a 4 gig SDHC card for about 57 Euros. If you want to pay less, the still very decent SuperCard DS One (SDHC) with 4 gig card comes in at about 40 Euros. Same price for an R4 with 2 gig card. All are available without cards as well. Just look if you find a seller that ships to the States.

Of course you'll lose lots of money through shipping and the strong Euro but finding the modules is trivial...

answer: puppy linux

[omz]

"What is the fastest booting operating system out there that is still sufficient for editing text?"

certainly: Puppy Linux.

7 seconds and you are ready

Re:answer: puppy linux

[techno-vampire]

I'll second that! I've got it running on an old laptop (PII 266, 96Meg RAM) and it boots into a GUI in well under a minute. On a modern machine, if all you want is a CLI, I can well believe that claim of 7 seconds. If you want an easy, light weight editor, use nano, as has been mentioned elsewhere. It's not included by default, but a quick search of their user forum will find you a download.

Your best bet with no futzing around

[jvin248]

is to load Damn Small Linux onto a USB flash drive and boot from there. Then you've got a full desktop to actually do a few things with and you don't have to spend a bunch of time "compiling" other stuff; unless of course that's your hobby.

Different application, but check into ltsp.org as they made significant boot time reductions for the client machines. If you're doing a project to compress the next Windows or Ubuntu boot code then look there for what they did as a good proxy.

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:You must be doing something wrong.

[DavidD_CA]

For what it's worth, I second and third that.

I have Vista Business running on a two-year-old Dell laptop with 1 GB of RAM. It boots up to usable in under 2 minutes, and Word 2007 takes about 5 seconds.

If I have the laptop in standby, which it can stay in for about a half day without charging, it "boots" in about 5 seconds, plus another 5 to get on the wireless network.

As for jotting quick notes... I send myself emails from my phone. Works great, and I can attach an audio recording if I don't want to type.

Re:You must be doing something wrong.

[cgenman]

The XP boots and loads to desktop a bit slower than yours (this isn't a spring chicken laptop). But as large portions of what used to consistute boot time in NT4 now happen after the desktop appears, the destop isn't usabe for several minutes afterwards. It is bogged down while windows starts its services, the virus checker initializes, office (and any other app that I haven't caught) pre-load themselves, everything phones home to version check, etc.

Sleep usually works, but drains the battery. Hybernate is a neat trick, but XP has never been particularly good at recovering sucessfully on this laptop.

And I love OS's. I'm currently triple booting with Sky OS, Ubuntu, and XP. DOS, Minuette, Kolibri, BusyBox, and others are all great choices to try.

N800

[dmsuperman]

My Nokia N800 is running 24/7, with a sketchpad just like 3 seconds away. I can either draw my notes, or flip open my bluetooth keyboard and type up some notes.

How about Damn Small Linux?

[MattBD]

I think Damn Small Linux is perfect for this. It's very fast to boot on most machines, can easily be carried around on a CD or USB pendrive, it has a GUI that's reasonably easy to use though minimal, it has Nano and Beaver for text editing, and can be extended easily thanks to MyDSL. It's also possible to install it to HD. As long as you're comfortable mounting devices from the command line, it should be a good choice.

Coleco Adam!!

[__aamisb9940]

Boots straight to a Word Processor :D

Re:Hibernate. Or get a phone with a notes function

[ohxten]

Agreed. My PC uses only three watts when running in suspend-to-disk mode (equal to the amount it uses when powered off), and boots instantly when I wake it up.

re: Not hard -- Use Vista

[neapolitan]

Whenever I run Vista my computer gets a fast boot to the main screen.

In fact, one time I kicked my monitor clear across the room, and I am generally a very calm person.

Alphasmart works better for me than a laptop

[GMFTatsujin]

When I want to write NOW NOW NOW, I reach for my Alphasmart. I like the instant-on ability, and the insanely long battery life.

What really makes me happy is that it doesn't have the usual distractions of a desktop. No internet, no games, no browsing, no music ...

It's a word processor. That's all it does, and it does that one thing very well indeed. And for creative, but easily distracted minds like mine, that's a real plus.

It doesn't host USB formatted drives, though it can be used as a USB keyboard to rapidly transfer your writing to another computer. Just plug it in and hit "send."

Re:Alphasmart works better for me than a laptop

[rpbird]

Get your Alphasmart new if you're going to get one. There is currently an Alphasmart bubble on eBay, even the 3000 is going for over $50, and the Neo is going for $160 ($200 new). Also LCD screens exposed to a lot of light and use have a finite lifetime before "greening out." This makes them very hard to read. Creeps on ebay have been photoshopping the green out of the displays, when they aren't using stock pics. Be Warned!

Solved 20 Years Ago

[reallocate]

Twenty years ago I was using DOS. It booted almost instantly. If I wanted to, I might have edited autoexec.bat to include a command to launch an editor at the end of the boot. Or, I might have used a TSR like Sidekick that would have provided access to a text editor, and more, at the touch of a key.

Modern operating systems are several orders of magnitude larger than DOS. Hence, the longer boot times.

Remember, however, that Unix and Linux are text-based operating systems. You don't need to run X, the graphical interface, if you don't want to. You can alter the boot scripts of a Unix/Linux machine to stop at the text interface, ask you which interface you want to use, or just boot in text mode and launch a text editor.

Re:Solved 20 Years Ago

[owlstead]

On the other hand, you now have a nice graphical unit. For just typing text, this may be a bit much, but even then I do like proportional fonts when reading stuff. Furthermore, you are connected to the rest of the world, you can edit multiple documents and even document types at the same time etc.

I've switched back to DOS (in VMWare) for a while, and I must say that except for the WarlordsII game that I was playing, it was not a pleasant experience. Then again, the startup times of the good old MSX was something else. If you wanted to play games you just put in 8, 16 or 32K of ROM. Current Smart Cards are more capable than the core of the MSX back then :)

DSL?

[houghi]

Loads pretty fast and you still have GUI for other things.

Macintosh OS X wakes instantly

[iliketrash]

Macintosh laptops running OS X will wake from sleep and be ready to use before you get the lid open. Just leave your favorite text editor or word processor open when you put it to sleep so it is available in zero seconds.

I don't know about FAT32 support but this suggestion isn't so much for the OP as for others who might be interested.

This is not a new feature of Macintoshes--I have used Apple laptops since the mid 1990s and it has always been this way. And they will sleep for nearly a week before draining the battery, at which time they store everything to disk and then shut down.

Re:Macintosh OS X wakes instantly

[binary paladin]

I don't know about wake from sleep before I get the lid open, but it's less than 10 seconds generally (if I'm not running software requiring Rosetta or have a virtual machine open). And it reads FAT32 just fine.

Moblin: claims to boot in 5 seconds

[enough2000]

Moblin claims a boot time of 5 seconds - in that time a fully usable UI environment is loaded. http://moblin.org/netbooks-and-nettops I have recently seen a movie as a 'proof' on a conference but I cannot find it on youtube or similar.

alternative

[uniquegeek]

I'm not familiar with the current small/fast more obscure distros, so my first thought was

"I wonder how fast a really old OS would run on new hardware." Assuming it could run on the new hardware, of course.

Remember the "Turbo" button? Whoa. Slow down, buddy.

why flamebait

[unity100]

apart from the obvious insult of course.

it also beats me why someone would need to fire up another operating system to take notes. NOTES ffs.

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.

Pencil & paper

[ljw1004]

Pencil & paper.
Boot time appears almost instantaneous.
Very handy for jotting down an idea or two.
Battery doesn't run out.
I keep a pencil+paper on the door of my fridge, so it's always easy to find.
For storage, I use "back pocket of jeans" until I can upload it somewhere permanent.

Re: Not hard -- Use Vista

[magus_melchior]

Are you saying that you were able to alter the boot time by putting the machine in motion?

That's quite a kick you got there.

right (write?) tool for the job

[Tumbleweed]

Okay, listen, I'm as much a techhead as the next guy, and far more than most (check out my Slashdot user ID), but the right tool for this job seems to be pen and paper. I carry around a small notebook with me almost everywhere I go, and it's not the electronic variety. Actual dead-tree paper. I jot stuff down throughout the day, enroute to work at a stop light, during lunch, at the movies, whatever. I can also write things down to give to people. It never needs an electrical outlet or batteries, and doesn't even need to be solar-powered, and you don't look like a tool at a coffeeshop.

If this is simply too low-tech for your lifestyle, then might I suggest you get a smartphone. You most likely carry this with you at all times, and you can easily take notes on them. Some even have qwerty keyboards. There's a very nice looking one coming out on the Sprint network next month called the HTC Touch Pro. And if you want a slim no-keyboard model, the HTC Diamond is out in a week or so. Very high-resolution screen (VGA, which is, I think 50% better than that of the iPhone). You will almost certainly be able to put Google's Android on both of these phones. Personally, I'm waiting for the HTC Touch HD, with an 800x480 screen. :)

solid state disk laptops

[peter303]

Some are up to 32GB now.

sleep an EEE PC

[speedtux]

Point 1: Sleep and wake actually works on MacOS/X

My MacBook hangs every few dozen or so cycles. It's also rather ponderous.

Sleep/wake works a lot better on the OLPC or the EEE PC

Arch Linux

[bstamour]

I have been playing around with this very minimalist distro the past few days. I can get it to go from completly shut down to a graphical login in about 35 seconds. This includes grub and everything. Getting it to boot into a text-only login will probably take less time, but I haven't benchmarked it yet.

Re: always just put it to sleep

[neonsignal]

Exactly right, and it cuts out the BIOS startup as well! The text editor is already open on the document you were just working on.

Use a Blackberry

[gemada]

just take notes on a phone such as a BlackBerry. If you are connected to a BES, the notes will wireless sync in real time with the notes in your Outlook.

slackware 12.1

[sick_soul]

My slackware 12.1 (with kernel 2.6.26 though) boots in 30 seconds, from Loading Linux to the login prompt.
Then I'd go emacs -nw, but since you ruled it out, try the other already suggested simple editors
(nano seems a good choice).

4 minutes ???? wtf ????

[Hurricane Floyd]

Windows XP 4 minutes until a uasable boot? WTF, my old Dell D800 running XP SP3 can get to a usable desktop in 60 seconds or less, and yes I have about 50 applications installed. The trick is to keep your start-up streamlined, and always keep malware off your system.

Not all motherboards run coreboot

[tepples]

LinuxBIOS/Coreboot will get a system up in 3 seconds or less.

But requires a motherboard compatible with coreboot. Which do you recommend buying?

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.

Manilla Folder

[xactuary]

I keep my MacBook Air in a manilla folder and use the pen in my pocket to write directly on it. Time to boot: zero.

Oh come ON, it's obvious

[mnmn]

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.

Re:Oh come ON, it's obvious

[Arker]

*sigh*

DOS is going to have difficulty meeting the requirement to support lots of modern file systems I'm afeared. (And I could be wrong, if FreeDOS has gotten a LOT better since the last time I looked.)

And WordPerfect is NOT a text editor. It's a word processor. Totally different animal. Doh.

If you can get a DOS running with the necessary file system support, try to dig up an old copy of QEdit. That old thing rocked hard.

Or Xtree. Also rocked hard. Qedit was the best single-purpose text editor, Xtree was really a file manager with a great text editor built-in. Both far more lightweight than WP.

Re:Oh come ON, it's obvious

[julesh]

DOS is going to have difficulty meeting the requirement to support lots of modern file systems I'm afeared. (And I could be wrong, if FreeDOS has gotten a LOT better since the last time I looked.)

FreeDOS supports FAT32, which is what the OP asked for. There is a (commercial) driver available for NTFS, but I'm not sure whether or not it's any good.

Re:Oh come ON, it's obvious

[jamesh]

I still remember shift-7 prints.

Okay that one threw me for a minute... I think it might have been shift+F7 though... shift+7 normally gave you a '&' character :)

I used to love wordperfect for dos. It was sleek, ran almost identically on the Amiga, and while it took a small investment in time to get to know the keyboard codes, knowing them meant you could get things done really fast. I love vi for the same reason - you can edit text at high speed without your fingers leaving the home row.

I never found a version of wordperfect for windows that I liked though... it always just seemed easier to use word.

Re:Oh come ON, it's obvious

[Reziac]

Plain old MS-DOS 7 (as found under Win9x) is more stable (it will run for YEARS without needing a reboot -- crashes are symptomatic of bad system RAM), is essentially bug-free, handles FAT32 partitions of any size up to the safe FAT32 limit (which is 32GB -- larger partitions can experience data-wrapping/loss), and in my long experience is the fastest of the DOS variants. The ancient OAKCDROM.SYS and MSCDEX driver and interface (found with DOS6 and later) work fine with single-session CDs and DVDs, and the old M$ Mouse driver v8.2 works perfect.

This is the basic setup I still put on any machine that needs a DOS boot -- which I still use for old games, and sometimes because I'm in a hurry and like the OP, just want a text editor!

Re:Oh come ON, it's obvious

[Reziac]

Actually, WordPerfect works perfectly dandy as a text editor. Good old WP5.1 is my editor of choice for large textfiles, as once the textfile gets into the several-megs size, other editors slow down, whereas WP does not. It can save in either UNIX or DOS text formats (ie. without or with line breaks) and can handle the complete range of special characters, including an EOF marker in mid-document -- that chokes most text editors. It can do fuzzy search and replace; its macros can be set up to perform all sorts of tasks, including formatting and "fill in the blanks"; it includes primitive spreadsheet functions. It doesn't mind being called by other apps or run in a poor-man's multitasker like DesqView, or run in a modern environment like WinXP. And it is essentially bug-free and uncrashable.

I use it so routinely as a text editor from inside other apps, that I have a Handy WP Macro to save back to the original location as DOS-text and exit back to the parent app.

Continuing the bad analogy...

[Junta]

So hypothetical analogy guy is in one city, and complains that he must spend his nights in a city an hour away because his company is paying for his hotel and they will only pay for a Motel 6, which is in the city an hour away, and asking how to speed up the trip. You could either answer his question, or let him know about the Motel 6 a minute away that he missed..

Re:Continuing the bad analogy...

[ArsonSmith]

...Motel 6 a minute away that he missed...

Or more likely in this case he checked out and it was full of hookers, drug dealers and roaches, or didn't have cable TV so it didn't meet his full requirements. Hence his asking how to speed up the trip and not just where's the closest motel 6.

PalmOS

[vrmlguy]

Oh, you wanted something that runs on x86? Well, then you should have said so. Seriously, though, I've still got my old Palm III, which is perfect for taking notes, and it syncs with just about everything. A quick check of Ebay shows a "Palm III xe PDA" for $20, and a "Palm Pilot 3Com PDA Organizer - Palm III" for $15.

How about...

[Angostura]

... you velcro a small paper pad and pen to your laptop. Seriously.

QNX

[jbolden]

QNX can be boot in about a second and has both VI and Emacs. You can have EMACS preloaded as part of the boot and it won't add much time.

ALT + L

[coryking]

I'm pretty sure there is a config switch for it too, but ALT+L works for me.

Just never turn your laptop off...

[Offtopic]

It's that easy. Boot time -- 0 seconds.

FASTEST OS

[MoonlightofDeath]

The FASTEST OS I have seen is BeOS. It boots to a GUI in under 15 seconds on a Pentium II @ 200 MHz with MMX. Too bad it is no longer supported.

Sny computer

[Cannelloni]

I never turn my MacBook Pro off. It's ready to rock in about one second. I assume you can do the same with Linux, FreeBSD or even Windows. Why would you want to turn off a modern computer?

How 'bout freedos...

[GuyverDH]

http://www.freedos.org/cgi-bin/lsm.cgi?mode=dir&dir=edit

direct link for a smattering of editors for it...

should be quick - setup the autoexec.bat to start the editor of choice if want even faster...

QNX

[tetabiate]

Small, fast, and free.

Re: Not hard -- Use Vista

[Zwicky]

He just accelerated it so it's just logical that it would boot faster.

about the best I have found is

[gearloos]

pcdos on a recent/fast machine. It gets me to a prompt in 10 seconds if I remove the usb,cdrom etc drivers. simple dos editor from there.

Where have all the PDAs gone?

[rwa2]

You're looking for a PDA. Too bad no one really makes them anymore. The creators behind the Palm Pilot expressly designed the thing to compete with a pen-and-paper rather than the other digital organizers that were available at the time.

I have a work-provided blackberry, but I still find myself doing everything (except for checking email or using google maps) on my Palm TX.

I use tejpwriter to edit documents on SD cards, it's one of the few things that can grapple with large documents. With an portable IR or bluetooth keyboard you can actually do some serious editing with it, then sync up with your real computer later.

Also useful utilities such as PalmPDF allow me to proofread and refer to finished documents and presentations for research / rehearsals. All my other information comes in through SunRise + Plucker. It also comes with a stripped-down rudimentary MS-Office compatible Documents thingy, but I haven't found it very useful beyond the spreadsheet application.

For very quick notes I just use the "notes" scribblepad thing, and then transcribe it into the correct application later.

I wish they succeeded in porting Palm OS to Linux. Supposedly the Nokia N810 tablet has a working Palm Garnet VM that reportedly works pretty well.
http://www.access-company.com/products/gvm/
Seems like the best option so far for a "modern" PDA, though it wasn't expressly designed as one.

How about Splashtop

[Flossymike]

For such fast boots to a workable enviroment, Splashtop would seem ideal

http://www.splashtop.com/

Several of the Asus motherboards come with it. I'm sure it must be possible to modify it, but I haven't tried it let ... I'd like them to release one with integrated onboard Intel graphics.

Pen and Paper

[fluch]

Still the fasters thing to have is pen and some paper/small paper based notebook! Boot up within less than a second. Just keep it around. If keeping a laptop around is easier than a paper/pen, then attach the pen and paper to the notebook.

Alternate approach...

[Dzimas]

I have a surprisingly sleek Cambridge Z88 notepad from 1988 that I still use occasionally. It has an absolutely silent rubber keyboard with sculpted keys and a rather decent text editor built in. Total time to resume is around half a second and it runs 20 hours on 4 AA batteries.

How about 10 seconds from hibernation

[Jeff1946]

My dell 630 laptop with XP returns from hibernation in less than 10 secs and boots up (disk activity light is mostly off) in less than 45 secs. Hibernation works well on this system. If the system is in standby (small amount of power consumption) then is ready almost instantly, main delay in this case is the wireless connecting which for word processing shouldn't be necessary.

Latitude-On

[frs_rbl]

available on newer Dell Latitudes. I'm not sure USB drivers are included, though.
Here's a review

A tablet.

[Valar]

Not a tablet PC. A tablet, like a paper one. Keep one with you. Problem solved. If the thought is so short that a long boot time makes it inconvenient to jot down, then it will only take a second to type it up when you get in front of a comp.

Re:A tablet.

[Greyfox]

Yeah, at a typical meeting I attend these days, everyone (including me) has adopted this approach. A piece of paper still seems to be the most flexible approach. I'd be willing to consider an E-ink tablet with a stylus that lets me scribble and also makes other PDA functionality available, but so far I find a plain old notebook to be preferable to any electronic solution I've examined.

This is the fastest

[stm2]

http://picasaweb.google.com/sbassi/Fosiles#5241617089796398514

Emacs is a good OS

[Deorus]

Now you only need a decent text editor. I guess vim would do.

Sorry, couldn't resist.

Re: Not hard -- Use Vista

[spazdor]

"We've discovered... the anti-cluon."

Just an Editor that hasn't been mentioned

[fcf_il]

ne might be a nice option for what he is looking for, it uses the same default shortcuts as all the "usual" crap like notepad, EDIT etc. regarding the OS there have been some solid recommendations (xubuntu, customized debian with fluxbox, busybox is a bit far fetched in my opinion), however if you really want to tinker with it and optimize your boot time, but still maintain a fully operational OS, try gentoo.

Macbook 20s

[dindi]

Call me a mac zealot, but my MACbook sleeps immediately after closing the lid, can stay like this for more than 2 days, and comes back in less that 20 seconds, depending on what you run (I usually have thunderbird, firefox, terminals, synergy, and 5+ more things open and it is 15-20 seconds)....

Yeah .... a Windows laptop takes 2+ minutes to come back with XP, and a Vista laptop 5+ minutes to boot (new Compaq, NOTHING installed other than the standard crap) .... yeye ... you can get a faster one .... etc ....

Anyways ,... I am sure a Macbook air with very few things running can come back in less than 10 seconds ....

Just my take on it ... I love any flavour of unix ......... especially if it runs on something with an apple logo and starts with an "i" .....

Yeah ... my iphone is faster too than my crap S60 nokia !!!

Re:Macbook 20s

[drspliff]

My laptop (ultra-slim 1ghz Toshiba Portege R100) running WinXP goes to sleep within 2 seconds of closing the lid, and is back again within another 2 seconds of opening the lid, and on a full battery can go several days in sleep mode.

I wonder why some people just get fucked over by Windows (especially Vista) while others dont..

Perhaps I'm doing something wrong/right ?

Re:Macbook 20s

[dindi]

Dunno ... probably there are good machines running windows.

But I do not like windows, not because I am trendy, but because I want a fully operational UNIX system on my desktop. BSD, Linux, OSX are my choices, and of the three OSX integrates the better with the concept of a portable device that has a fully functional GUI with free/commercial applications of mature quality...

Well.... my last windows laptop takes like 4 minutes to came back to life, and several wifi disables until it reconnects to the net :)

Bluetooth Keyboard

[nick_davison]

And when Apple figures out that loud noise is everyone clamouring for them to make their bluetooth iPhone work with their bluetooth keyboard, it'll be an amazing note taking tool.

Until then, ignoring the staggeringly obvious, it's a pain in the ass to write more than a few sentences.

Don't get me wrong, I own one, I love it and I recommend it to people despite its many flaws because I think, even with them, it's still an amazing tool... But there are a few staggeringly, achingly obvious things they've totally failed to put in there. Copy and paste is one of them, bluetooth keyboard support on a bluetooth enabled device is another.

Umm.

[jiteo]

Carry a pen and small notepad.

grub. well, not really.

[radarsat1]

An editor would be a great addition to GRUB. I've used GRUB's "cat" command before to take a quick look at some text files. Being able to edit them would be a pretty simple additional command I would think, and it doesn't really need to "boot" at all.

ReactOS

[mebrahim]

If suspending is not your solution, try ReactOS. Last time I checked it was booting so fast. But it is not that mature of an OS.

AmigaOS

[aliquis]

I belive my Amiga booted in 8 seconds before I added all the patches, tools and accessories you wanted .. If you aborted the shell before loading Workbench you would probably shave off two-three seconds more ...

Had some miniemacs with the OS, and it seems it can use fat32:
http://www.amigahistory.co.uk/fat32.html

You can get USB aswell:
http://www.amigau.com/c-amiga/hardware.htm

I realise it's not a viable alternative today, but it's kind of sad how bad things develop considering how much faster todays machines is.

Reminds me of a youtube video with a Mac Classic running Claris Works (or something similar) and a more modern PC running Office Word or whatever, boot systems booting up, running the word processor and then writing something (and eventually saving and turning the machine of as well.)
Of course the new software is much more advanced, but the old mac did it faster .. And sometimes people don't need much more than that application offered.

Re:AmigaOS

[Fweeky]

I used to use a tool on the Amiga called FastBoot. Quite an impressive hack; it's basically Suspend to Disk. Disable task switching, write out memory to disk, when you next boot, run a tool to load it back in. Since I had a lot of crap running on my Amiga, with boot times of a minute or more, it was awesome using this to reduce that to a couple of seconds.

And.. indeed, this is exactly what I do on my Windows desktop, and indeed what I do on my XP partition on my laptop today; I Hibernate them so bootup happens in 20 seconds instead of 120 (yes, I still run a lot of crap).

Re:AmigaOS

[aliquis]

Yeah, I just close the lid on my MBP and open it up when I want to use it as well, working and (quite) reliable sleep rules!

I never used sleep before because either I ran some weird OS and I have no idea if it was even implemented or I tried it a couple of times in Windows but since most of the times the computer couldn't boot and the information would be lost by a hard reset I never trusted it and ended up never using it seriously.

Re:AmigaOS

[aliquis]

Yeah, my times estimate was for my a1200 with 030, 8MB fast and 1.7 GB 3.5" NEC HDD. Could have been from floppies to but I think the usual 8 or 12 seconds I measured some time was on the a1200. Was quite a few years since I booted it up the last time. I hope the drive isn't dead.

Re:AmigaOS

[aliquis]

Except that's AROS and not AmigaOS.

It looks somewhat like Workbench, it uses similar APIs, but it can't run AmigaOS apps and it's not AmigaOS.

AmiKit in UAE eventually running from some very small Linux dist or whatever would be more of an Amiga in that case.

And I've actually sometimes considered putting all my stuff in AmiKit and use that instead of the modern oses ;/

Too bad they killed it /:

You already gave us the answer...

[WCLPeter]

Both feel like an eternity if there isn't a pen and paper around.

You carry around a bag with a laptop and it has never occurred to you to put said pen and paper in one of the zipper sections?

PDA are another alternative

[DrYak]

Also, still in the "Does it necessarily have to be Linux ?" category, PDAs are another possibility too.

I have used several PalmOS based machines during my studies and even still now.

Turns on in less than a second, has hardware button that can be bound to jump straight into some text editing app (the default "Notes" app, or anything else can do the job to. Although "Office"-compatible editors like Documents-to-Go seem slower to start).

Also, PDA have lots of foldable keyboard solutions if you don't like stylus scribing (specially on older machine where you have to learn using another specialized character set) or if you don't like Palm Treo / Black Berry -like thumb keyboard.
Stowaway/Think outside/iGo used to produce nice keyboards, which unfolded into the same size are a desktop keyboard, but folded into a shape not that much more bigger than the PDA it self. Used to be connected to the serial port of the PDA, now the modern keyboards communicates using Bluetooth or IrDA.
Instant desktop, only a couple of seconds between your pocket and deployed on any approximatively flat surface.

I would recommend getting whatever PDA has a good response time (test first !) and good sync to your desktop (Palms are widely supported on most platforms. WinCE seems too. But what's the iPhone support under Linux ?) combined with a foldable Bluetooth keyboard from iGo, preferably a 5-rows one (1 number row and 3 rows of letter with a space bar, like your desktop), not a 4-rows one (only 3 rows of letter and a space bar, number are obtain using some shift-key and the first row of letters).

THE fastest would be

[Giant Electronic Bra]

A ROMed Linux. lol. There are a couple tablet PCs out there that will ROM boot linux. Basically it is just about instant on.

+1 vim + freebsd

[ufoolme]

+1 for vim +2 freebsd
Its not that bloody hard, what its like 5 or 6 keys/commands you need to learn to get started.
Thats less than most fps(etc) these days

Wrong question

[Sepiraph]

Why is your computer off in the first place?

Slackware.

[Irvu]

If you want a light fast system then build it with slackware or, if you don't mind more memory you might build a gentoo system.

In eithercase build only the essentials into the kernel and turn off all of the nonessential services. My suggestion, if you want to share the laptop with a "full featured" os is to wither create two root partitions one fast one full and then stock the fast one with only the minimal amounts then share /home.

Or alternately mess with the kernel flags and add startup scripts to kick it into a no-services profile. This is one area where gentoo is nice in that you can set a bootlevel that turns off everything logging, services, etc.

The disadvantage of the scripted form is the messiness with linking the two while the separate disks makes for a "cleaner" partition, and less likelyhood that booting into a full or minimal system will screw with essential /etc files.

Re:Slackware.

[smittyoneeach]

Yeah, I'm a gentoober, but TFQ was about the Smallest Thing That Could Possibly Work for simple text edits.
Thus, getting it into a straight-shot boot image, with enough editor, hardware- and filesystem drivers to persist files would seem to be the ticket.
Clearly, when you up the ante to "full featured" then you're going to want more love.

That's easy

[R3d Jack]

Get a cell phone with a text edit capability. I have a Windows Mobile phone (useful but annoying); with it, I can open an app and leave it open in the background.

Use the best tool for the job

[La Camiseta]

You mentioned that you don't want to wait too long for a computer to boot up to to jot down your idea. My recommendation would be to use what's worked for hundreds of years, a pen and paper - pens are fairly nondescript and a nice moleskine along with a decent fountain pen (you can get a decent one for $30-50 that should last as long as you take care of it) makes writing a sheer pleasure.

Palm

[sherriw]

Not sure if this would apply, but I can have my Palm TX booted and open a Word document for editing in under 6 seconds. If you store your documents on an SD card, you can pop that in the Palm, or into a USB adapter to edit on your computer.

Re:Umm...

[Vexorian]

Four minutes to be ready. It happens on windows, it also happens in gnome to an extent. You boot the OS in X minutes, but there's still a long way to go before you are actually able to do stuff on it, in the case of windows XP, you need to put your password then wait about 30 seconds until windows stops loading all the startup programs so you can actually tell it to open a text editor...

Linux can boot to usable point in 3-5 seconds

[tpepper]

I guess there's not much posted yet, but Arjan and Auke presented at the Linux Plumbers Conference this past week and demo'd a not massively modified linux booting to fully usable (all the way to X even) in 5 seconds. Discussions and hacking at the conference apparently trimmed an additional second or two off that. There was a lot of excitement, so I'd expect to see their mods making it upstream into the kernel, distros and X.

XP in 4 minutes? Yeah, right...

[pinkfloydhomer]

A clean install of XP will give you notepad etc. and will boot in 15 seconds or so on a pc that's not older then 4 years or so.

PDA

[savuporo]

Either any embedded linux or winmobile PDA will do the trick, dude. Try one with the full qwerty keyboard like HTC Tytn. Always with you, always good for notes and if you dont want to write just click the voice recorder or take a picture of the sketch u just drew on the whiteboard.

Re:PDA

[krazytekn0]

except for the whole

can still access fat32 formatted USB drives...

Thing,
If you have a PDA/phone that can access a fat32 usb drive then please let me know, cause that would be awesome.

iPod touch or iPhone or MacBook all instant

[gig]

An iPod touch or iPhone or MacBook all wake from sleep instantly and don't need to be shutdown. So if you need a full PC then get a MacBook and you can just open it. By the time the lid is open it is ready for you to work. On the iPod touch or iPhone there is a built-in Notes app and Mail app or you can install SSH or WordPress. Again they are available instantly as soon as you want to use them.

2004 LG Cell Phone

[tknd]

My 2004 LG cell phone has a note taking program built-in. Sure, it isn't a text editor or anything but from time to time I do write a few words or a number in there if I have to.

Emacs is the friendliest editor, period.

[bboxman]

Can't really answer the question, as emacs is the most friendly editor out there. VI isn't too shabby as well. How can you expect to be taken seriously after taking a rude swipe at the two most popular (and for good reason) editors out there?

Re:Emacs is the friendliest editor, period.

[rs232]

"How can you expect to be taken seriously after taking a rude swipe at the two most popular (and for good reason) editors out there?"

I concur, as I referred to in a previous post, it can be configured for basic editing. Same key presses as for MS Windows keyboard. For anything else there's a mode file out there. What's more it don't choke on large files and it's buffer ring means you never lose a file. eg, you don't write to the file but to a temporary buffer, until you save it. For search press CTRL s and start typing the search string, the text is immediately highlighted on screen. No nonsence with clicking drop down click boxes.

In contrast to that other WordProcessor that (in spellcheck mode) asks if you want to change the current word, only the dialogue box pops up over the word so as you can't see it .. :)

Linux-BIOS, Instant Internet or Express Gate

[kubitus]

all are Linux-based OS placed in BIOS ROM available 5 to 10 seconds after power on. ASUS offers with their P5Q Delux a built in SSD so you can store your text straight away without mounting a USB stick or harddisk.

tell you that is the future - and I bet hell and heaven that M$ works on their version like mad.

imagine a boss who would not like to have his computer up and running immediately after flipping the power switch!

if M$ can not do that they have lost the game!

Ah the smug self-satisfaction...

[msimm]

Can't we just go back to pickin on Windows users? :-)

Re:PDA

[uvajed_ekil]

Yep, when I pick up my Palm Treo it is usable in about 1 second. If you REALLY need something super uberquick so you don't forget your brilliant stroke of genius, you probably don't need everything that a laptop can do. You can prbably get a decent Treo 650 or something else with a qwerty keyboard for under $75, OS included. Otherwise, I'd say run any minimalistic linux distro with any one of dozens of text editors. If that's all you need or want, you have zillions of choices that will all function exactly as you require. Heck, even a fully-loaded Linux Mint setup boots pretty quick on my mediocre laptop.

PDA = Instant-On Solution

[Da VinMan]

In my case, I use a T-Mobile MDA, which has a slide-out keyboard. I've also been looking at the Wing, which is basically the next version of the MDA.

It won't access your USB sticks though. However, if the file in question is just a to-do list, you can keep that on the PDA anyway. YMMV

Macbook

[johzee]

Macbook with OS X cold boots in 25 seconds. Put it in sleep mode (battery decreases with 16%/day) and boot in 2-3 seconds

Really fast for text editing

[hobbes75]

See Oberon or the newer Bluebottle/A2 for booting with USB sticks:

http://www.ocp.inf.ethz.ch/

You can boot the OS natively, or if needed start it as applications on Windows or Linux/MacOS/Unix (x86).

If 30 seconds is okay...

[zartacla]

...you always have Puppy Linux,a small, fast and fully functional distribution. With a customized kernel, I was able to get a boot up time of around 30 seconds on a 900 MHz Celeron processor, 512 mb RAM. Even with the default kernel, on my machine it takes around 38 seconds.

Tandy 100

[inKubus]

I'm surprised no one's mentioned the Tandy 100. There is still a lot of support out there, such as Club100, etc.

Someone should really make a new one with the same keyboard, maybe a better screen and WiFi that still runs on AA's.

There's the alphasmart, which is getting there, and runs PalmOS.

Syllabe

[chrysalis]

Try Syllabe : http://web.syllable.org/pages/index.html

It boots almost instantaneously.

iPhone e-mail

[AndyCanfield]

With an iPhone or a BlackBerry or some such, you can write a note and e-mail it to yourself, pick it up on your big machine later. Almost nothing to carry around.

ATARI COMPUTER MEMO PAD

[phozz bare]

nuff said.

XP / Vista and sleepmode

[PermanentMarker]

use XP or Vista in combination with sleepmode, or hybernation..
on my labtop that takes about 5 sec And gives me Word a powerfull text editor, but if you prefer you might use notepad as wel.

two options

[Tom]

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.

DOS + EDIT

[tankbob]

Whats wrong with DOS it can boot up in under 20 seconds and get you into edit?

Sleep mode

[Traumflug]

You're after the wrong target, sir. If you want to have your computer off, but available quickly, you should look to get suspension work right. Suspend to RAM is as quickly as 1 to 2 seconds in each direction (on -> off or off -> on). So, before you could take a full breath, the computer is fully booted, with all needed apps running and ready to take your notes.

The drawback is, on commodity PCs, suspend to RAM rarely works to full satisfaction. State of the art are Macintoshes; Linux and friends have still to catch up in this area.

quick boot

[mliikset]

if you run grub or lilo, you could specify a very stripped down kernel with no support for anything optional for a quick boot, but with a login to negotiate, i'd look to see if any of the dos variants are usb qualified.

You answered your own question

[QuietLagoon]

Pencil and paper.

The Good old dos days

[zakezuke]

I remember running Qedit on a Compaq Contura Aero 486sx33 laptop, and it was spiffy. Quick to boot, did the job, and done. I even allocated a ramdisk for this purpose so I could get max battery life. I also had WP 6.0 while limited to 16 colors it also did the trick with minimal resources.

But I really don't miss the good old Dos days. Seriously! Tweeking with QEMM to maximize that 640k, having to tweak the config for that odd ball program that simply refused to run even if you shoved everything into himem, it just needed an extra kilobyte or so. Even 256 colors @ 640*480 was a dream for many programs as some vintage software was hard wired for a series of graphics chipsets. VESA support was a godsend, not that I had enough vid memory to support that on the POS laptop.

IBM tried releasing a dos webbrowser some years back, perhaps 1998 or so IIRC, and it was rather the same story, very limited support for 8 bit graphics, and you pretty much had to know your shit to get it working well, or invest in some hardware which defeats the point.

So while part of my understands going back to dos for speedy turn it on and type out some notes, the dos era was a fucking headache.

Atari Portfolio

[asciiRider]

The Atari Portfolio Palmtop! Basically runs Dos 2.11. Couple of AA batteries. Open Lid, on. One keystroke and you are in an editor.

But seriously, just use a pen and paper.

Youre unlucky ...

[tr9sh]

... because emacs would fit you perfectly. It just lacks a good text editor :(

QED on palm pilot

[johnrpenner]

if you want to boot up in under a second (!) - and just bang in a couple lines of text and save - done (in less than twenty seconds) - the handiest text editor i've found is QED for the palm pilot. -- you could basically hit the power button, see and edit your text within 1 second of wake-up. click the power button again - and it would be away in your pocket - whip it out, click power again, and still be exactly where you left off -- now if only the iPod Touch could get something so advanced -- but it seems that iPod Touch thinks 3D animation and fancy transparency effects are more important than basic text editor functionality -- so the Palm still rules over the iPhone (in this department). although i have high hopes that the iPhone will, some year, actually get to have as useful text editor as the palm has had for the last ten years!

2cents
john penner.

Meh. 25 Seconds restore from hibernate in XP

[barrkel]

Only takes 25 seconds to restore from hibernation in XP on my laptop. That's not that long.

Of course, resume from sleep is a lot faster, but that will eat battery if you don't keep your laptop plugged in often.

netbook in sleep mode?

[SCHecklerX]

See subject.

Acer Aspire one

[udippel]

This is not exactly what you asked for, but the Linpus Linux boots mine in exactly 21 seconds. Two seconds too long, I know ...

GNU Emacs for Microsoft Windows ..

[rs232]

Don't discard Emacs just yet, run this on top of Win95 B and you will get what you want. There's even a Windows keyboard compatibility mode so, CTRL ZXCV works as does CTRL S for save, the rest I can't remember ..

GNU Emacs FAQ for MS Windows

Qedit for DOS ..

[rs232]

I was always impressed with QEDIT, it's macro language was fairly usefull ..

Off to Linux GUI in 5 seconds

[klossner]

At the just-concluded Linux Plumbers Conference, Arjan van de Ven and Auke Kok demonstrated a netbook that went from powered off to GUI up in five seconds. Jaws dropped around the room. I haven't seen a formal write-up yet -- maybe LWN will cover it? -- but you can get a taste from the conference notes.

High points that I remember:

• Eliminate silly time-wasters. Starting X involved running the compiler (!) to preprocess a config file.
• Determine which files are needed to boot, then start the boot by kicking off a super read-ahead program to suck those files into the page cache.
• Boot to a stripped-down GUI, not to full-up Gnome.
• Let networking come up asynchronously.

Windows XP

[chis101]

I know that no one here will care, but if you don't have dozens of programs starting up with Windows XP, it starts very quickly. My laptop is a Core2Duo 1.8Ghz with 2GB of RAM, so nothing cutting edge, and from a complete power off, it gets from selecting WinXp in grub to having Firefox loaded and displaying Google on my wireless in 23 seconds.

Coming from sleep, the computer is usable in 6 seconds, although it takes an additional 4 seconds for wireless to be back up.

Hibernation (with just Firefox w/ 4 tabs) takes 8 seconds to be usable, 4 additional seconds for wireless.

Note that these times (for hibernate and cold boot) are measured starting from when Grub begins booting the OS, as I don't think it's fair to count the BIOS time and Grub's menu against the OS, as that time would be added to any OS.

So, it may be that the answer to your 20 second boot time requirement is to use any operating system, and just don't start loads of crap with it.

Re:PDA

[Faux_Pseudo]

I don't know of any PDA that can access a fat32 'drive'. I do know that plenty that take SD cards. With a cig lighter or smaller sized adapter that card can be turned into a 'drive' on a computer. SD cards can hold up to 8 gig these days but price per gig the larger ones are still price. Good news is that you can fit 5 of them in a match box and if you stick with two to four gig cards it won't cost more than one hundred USAD.

Add a bluetooth or IR keyboard and key size won't even been an issue for typing. My hand writing sucks so I had to go digital a long time ago. I may be just one of the grunts at work but when it comes time for a meeting I pull out my PDA, a folding IR keyboard and am ready to take more notes than anyone else and I am able to do it faster than anyone else. And the whole thing fits in pocket as long as you aren't wearing denim.

Try a pencil and a piece of paper

[crovira]

Boot time, as fast as I can grab 'em.

Power requirement, none except some not too dim external light.

I did not read the comments

[Larryish]

thus I do not know if someone has mentioned an old operating system from the dark ages...

PEN and PAPER version 1.0

you can get a short ink pen and a small Ampad-brand leather-bound memo book with refills for around $5 total, and the notebook even survives repeated washings when you get drunk and leave it in your pants pocket

been carrying one for years, it "just works"

The geek way.

[tagnu]

Setup your residential/office phone with 1. Voice recoder 2. Voice -> text converters 3. Connect it to a computer with internet And when you don't have a paper/pen and you have your mobile phone (I wonder where mankind is going) Call up any of those phones and say everything that you wanted to. Write some program to send those converted 'voice-text' as an email to your email id. Geeek enough?

Hibernate once, resume many. (HORM)

[Myself]

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.

Re:Hibernate once, resume many. (HORM)

[NetSettler]

Cool! Thanks for the cross-reference.

Re:Not hard - Use Palm

[ashitaka]

Bingo.

I've started carrying around my Palm T3 with the Palm keyboard. I type faster than I write and have a doodling app when I need to write simple diagrams. I have the wireless card when I need to check email etc.

Smaller and lighter than even a micro laptop and turns on right where I left off.

Buy a PDA/Phone?

[mlk]

A good one with a keyboard.

don't know if it's "free"

[Overzeetop]

HP has a bootable DOS for USB keys. I presume there's support for writing to and from the USB key (duh), but don't know if the drivers can be reused in disk-based DOS system. I use it to make my usb bootable (actually, it's microSD with an adapter the size of the USB contacts). When I got it, HP was giving it away via free download. No, I don't have a link.

Re: Not hard -- Use Vista

[stinkydog]

Of course, by accelerating a Vista box to near the speed of light, boot times become much more managable. Relativly speaking...

Get an Apple Laptop

[cyman777]

boot it up.

Close lid.

Open lid and work. Immediately. No "resume". No wait. It just works.

Close lide.

The biggest advantage of MacBooks IMHO is that they have NO startup time when opening the lid. The battery stays OK with a closed lid for about 3 days, so no need to really boot up.

UED on DOS

[jonadab]

PC-DOS 3.3 will boot in under twenty seconds at 4.mumble MHz, so on modern hardware it ought to be right near instantaneous. Back in the day I used an extremely cuspy little text editor called UED (short for "useful editor"), which I'm sure is still floating around and available someplace or another. (It was at one point distributed along with the DOS version of Online Bible. This was in the days before Windows came pre-installed on new computers, when most consumer software was still written for DOS, or in some cases for Mac and DOS.) UED doesn't have huge piles of features, but it can open up to nine files at a time, cut/copy/paste between them in full lines, traditional ranges, or rectangular blocks, among other features. (The handling of rectangular blocks is actually significantly better than in Emacs.) Its menu system is very straightforward, and everything is very discoverable. Oh, and it's small. (The version I have is 38704 bytes. Yes, I still have it sitting around, though I haven't attempted to use it lately, since I'm comfortable with Emacs now.)

One cool thing about this kind of option is that the partition you use for it can be a *tiny* (as in, measured in kilobytes, depending on how much data you need to be able to store there at once) FAT16 system, or even FAT12. Then in your main OS you can just mount it and copy/move the text files over, possibly in an init or login script. It takes up so little drive space, the menu configuration stuff to get the boot loader to offer it to you as an option on power-up is actually a significant fraction.

And speed? Oh, yes. I've used DOS 5 and UED on a Pentium II system (233 MHz), and it really screams. Greased lightning on wet ice, man. Makes vim look like molasses on a cold February night.

"TED" on DOS - 3KB of assembler!

[billstewart]

There's an editor I used to put on all my DOS floppies called "TED" - it was 3KB of assembler, WYSIWYG monospaced text, and did most of what I needed if I didn't need regular expressions; otherwise I'd fire up some kind of vi or emacs clone. It was small enough that there was no reason to stick to EDLIN.

My DOS and Windows wallpaper back in those days was Saint Dogbert saying "Out Out!! You Demons of Stupidity!!" from the Dilbert cartoon, becuse that was obviously what "DOS" stood for.

I do have friends who were using the little HP palmtop computer that ran DOS as recently as a year or so ago; merely being way obsolete doesn't keep them from being one of the better personal organizers ever made. I had a Psion 3A that was of similar wonderfulness, though being a bit larger and heavier meant it got dropped a bit more often and eventually died.

PalmOS or FancyCellPhone or Voice Notes

[billstewart]

If you take notes on dead tree scraps and want to import them into your calendar or real notes, where they're much easier to retrieve when you want them, you'll have to retype them anyway. If you've got a cellphone with a keyboard, that means you don't need to haul a second device around. In my case, I'll need to get a Crackberry(tm) for work, but I'm currently using voice notes on my cellphone when I don't have a computer handy.

CellPhone VoiceNotes, or old Psion 3A

[billstewart]

Voice Notetaking on a cellphone is really convenient for short notes - in my case the phone's a Nokia, but many other phones can do it with varying UI qualities. After all, the phone has voice compression hardware, and any phone with a camera has enough memory to store a lot of notes as well.

I've used PalmOS, and liked the integrated functionality and especially the Sync-With-MS-Outlook features, even though the OS in Palm3 - Palm7 days actually sucked rocks. Are text notes still limited to 4KB or whatever? (Unfortunately, I can no longer find the right drivers to sync my Palm7 with Outlook, plus my work laptop doesn't have a serial port any more :-) (And either Nokia's phone-sync software or my USB BlueTooth Widget's drivers or something also fail badly, so they can no longer sync up even though the could a year ago...)

Before I got the Palm3 I had a Psion 3A, an absolutely wonderful device that was one of the predecessors to Symbian. It was a bit too big, but in return it had a keyboard that let me type two-thumbed fast enough to take fairly full notes from phone messages or meetings, as opposed to PalmOS Graffiti which I was good at but could only do about half as fast.

Re: Gentoo

[knorthern knight]

> Yeah, I'm a gentoober

Me too. In response to the question, I would recommend doing the basic stage 3 install, and not bother with X. Install vim/whatever and strip out anything that you don't require. If you really want fast booting, boot in single mode.

Solved 26 years ago!

[secretagentmoof]

Jef Raskin, of Mac fame, developed the SwyftCard - a ROM on a slot that acted as an embedded OS + word processor. You just turned on the machine and in under a second, wallah. Word processor. (It also did neat things like not requiring you to format a floppy in advance, too.)

Use VI

[burbilog]

Actually Vi is really friendly if you touch type already. Just take some time to learn Vi commands.

DOS

[Ngarrang]

DOS is the king, baby! And there exists software to let DOS access FAT32, NTFS, USB devices, etc. You don't get plug'n'play, but you will get an OS that boots fast, uses very little ram and can use a friendly text editors.

Cheapphone is cheap

[tepples]

Aren't you more likely to have your cellphone in your pocket than be lugging around a laptop?

That wouldn't work for everyone. For instance, I carry a Virgin Mobile phone on a $65/yr plan for urgencies. The cheapest data plan for a smartphone would cost an order of magnitude more.

Re: Gentoo

[smittyoneeach]

Yeah, but you're still pulling an initramfs, and then doing a regular init, which my method avoids.

Re:A blast from the past -- Atex to PC

[InitZero]

In 2001, the newspaper I worked for got rid of Atex (a PDP-11 based publishing system -- amazing in its own right) and replaced it with a more modern pagination system that involved an RS/6000 system on the backend and new-fangled Windows NT machines at the front.

A few of the reporters were still using Tandy 100/102 laptops to file stories. The Tandy 100 ran about 18 hours on four double-A batteries. It had a 300 baud modem to send stories. In short, it was awesome. One reporter specifically refused to accept a brand new IBM ThinkPad instead favoring the Tandy 102 for another year. (Once he discovered that the ThinkPad could download porn, he gave up the Tandy 102 willingly.)

The fully-funcational Tandy 102 laptop cost just $500 in 1986 and our reporters used it and the 100 for more than 15 years. Today a laptop will cost you about twice that, have a battery that last less than half as long and won't last you more than five years. Ah, progress.

I still have my collection of TRS gear... TRS-80 Model I, Model IV, Tandy 100, Tandy 102, Tandy 200. All boot except the Model I. The Model IV is becoming less useful because the 5 1/4 floppies aren't aging well. The Laptops, however, work great because everything is solid-state. No moving parts!

—Matt

Smartphone

[ballylama]

Get yourself a smartphone. I just got my first one and have since started leaving my laptop in the bag more and more. When I do boot it, I do a quick sync. Everything you state is at your fingertips with no boot time at all.

NEC MobilePro

[bargonzo]

instant on, ok for text (not rich text)

saves to compact flash card (for USB access)

cheap

just can't read it outside (depending on model)

Mod Parent Informative

[mpapet]

I've had to mess about with udev rules and it will do _exactly_ what the parent says it will do.

Grandparent is wrong

A half-serious suggestion

[ncc74656]

An Apple II with a CFFA would probably boot into AppleWorks and be ready to use before the monitor finished warming up. To get the data out, you pop the (CompactFlash) card out, pop it into a card reader on your other computer, and use something like CiderPress to pull the data off of it.

For convenience, instead of using the CFFA's onboard CompactFlash slot, I'd get an IDE-to-CF adapter and connect it to the CFFA with an IDE cable.

Re:A blast from the past -- Atex to PC

[retchdog]

Matt,

Tommyknocker here. Someone just mentioned an IBM 2314 in a response to a comment of mine. This inspired me to check up on you and I'm surprised to find such a recent and serendipitously topical post!

Thanks again for taking Wheel and me through the-newspaper-you-worked-for-before-"the newspaper you worked for"'s data systems. We had a great time. Hope all is well with you and your wife and kids.