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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."
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.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
My laptop never shuts down, I always just put it to sleep. Flip open, hack away. Less than 5 seconds. Oh, that's under Ubuntu, by the way.
Most modern O/S support suspend to disk which can give you a usable desktop in under 20s. Per your example both XP and Ubuntu can do it in that time. And that's ignoring the even faster suspend to ram which almost all laptops feature these days (granted that for that there is a power requirement).
It's not in the 'spirit' of your question, but perhaps it's a better solution to your problem?
Windows in 6 Bytes (IA-32) : 90 90 90 90 CD 19
tomsroot http://www.toms.net/rb/
-Alex. http://bit.ly/1iVPtfA
How about DOS?
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.
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
Windows Vista Ultimate. Just get a sharpie and write on the screen.
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.
I'd say Stallman's first OS:
doofus@hotdog:~$ time emacs -nw
real 0m2.075s
user 0m0.372s
sys 0m0.076s
doofus@hotdog:~$
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.)
Paleotechnologist and connoisseur of pretty shiny things.
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.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
http://www.crash-override.net/nethacklinuxdownload.html
boots from a floppy.
0) generate character
1) find magic marker
2) scribble on the floor
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.
Hibernate. My laptop boots in about 20-30 seconds, with windows XP. I hear Ubuntu boots faster out of hibernation.
Or you could get a cell phone with a note-taking function. My work-provided Palm Treo does this, Blackberrys do, iPhones... Hell, even phones without a full keyboard typically have a notes application these days, and you can type fairly fast with T9-word.
I think you're asking the wrong question here. Any decent laptop with Linux or XP or OSX should be able to go into suspend mode and resume in about 2-8 seconds. I think my laptop hasn't been 'rebooted' in about two months, I just leave it constantly in suspend mode and activate it for 5-30 minutes at a time.
Even if you get a near instant booting OS just the Power on Self Test is going to take longer than resuming from a suspend.
Many of these will boot in less than 3 sec to a command console.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
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.
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
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 :)
I recommend a solution of hydrocyanic acid.
Next question.
Edward@Tomato - /home/Edward/ man woman
man: no entry for woman in the manual.
"Qua!?"
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.
www.menuetos.org
Both 64 and 32 bit versions.
I think you'll find that boots *Very* fast.
Open Source Drum Kit, LPLC deve board - mjhdesigns.com
"Both feel like an eternity if there isn't a pen and paper around."
The problem seems kind of artifical if you're fine working with paper anyway. Otherwise, I'd resort to just leave the machine on, which I usually do anyway.
I 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.
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.
Why choose white shoes?
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! :)
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.
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.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
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
EPOC: Instant-on for years after first boot, best served in an E Ink reincarnation of the Psion (to be developed)...
DOS will not have any of the power management features required to operate a modern laptop. The hit to your battery life would be SEVERE
Its not clear that battery life is relevant to the question. Original question did after all mention
"boot my laptop and edit a few lines of text, or jot down an idea or two"
I think even the worst possible power management should survive long enough to meet that task. If boot speed is the primary objective, then DOS should be just fine. The question did not say that the user wants to boot quickly and write a novel, after all.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
The email client just isn't there, and the web browser is just barely better than IE7.
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.
I think the people saying to use hibernation/sleep features are probably closest to right for most practical purposes now. I thought I'd add a historical side-note...
In the 1980's, MIT Lisp Machines were often used in demos for visitors from funding agencies. Probably mostly people from (D)ARPA. And things would often go wrong. Things had to reboot.
Now instruction times were a lot slower then, but you'd be surprised how little boot times have changed over the years. Seems like every time someone speeds up the hardware, they also slow down the speed of booting of both at least the operating system and maybe also the programs. So normal booting was a process of 30 seconds or a minute, as I recall. And that was inconvenient for these demos.
So someone worked out a way that you could do something called instaboot. You'd load up everything you needed and would save the image, kind of like going into standby mode on your computer. But it was intended to be restarted multiple times. When you started, it would just pull in the pages that you needed first to let you run, pulling in other things you needed on demand.
You could save it in whatever state you wanted, for example with the editor already loaded and started. Even with files loaded ito editor buffers if you wanted, though that obviously ran the risk that if you later edited them on two subsequent occasions, you might get a conflict. But that was up to you. Nothing kept you from trying.
The effect was startling. You could reboot the machine and be up and running in about a second, maybe two. The only evidence was that the screen would change and would kind of bounce (some sort of sync pulse or degaussing thing or something, I never quite knew what that was).
So demos were always loaded and saved, then booted into. When the demo went bad, you just hit reboot. It was so fast, people would notice something had happened but often wouldn't know what. "Just garbage collecting," we would say. Well, it was sort of true. Rebooting is a particularly efficient way to garbage collect.
For some reason, that feature was not carried forward into later models of the Lisp Machine. It was only there on the CADR at MIT (and perhaps the LM-2 and the TI Explorer and LMI Lambda, I'm not sure, since I never used those, though they were repackaged variants of the same thing). It didn't go into the Symbolics 3600 nor later series machines.
Kent M Pitman
Philosopher, Technologist, Writer
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.
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
No USB drive compatibility, but instant on.
The love of newspaper field reporters for decades:
http://oldcomputers.net/trs100.html
Not bad for 1983.
__ Someday, but not this morning, I'll finally learn to use the preview button.
"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.
In post Patriot Act America, the library books scan you.
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.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
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.
"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
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.
The Dana seems more useful!
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.
Boots straight to a Word Processor :D
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.
Slashdotter, ID #101. UIDs are in binary, right?
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."
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.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
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.
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.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
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.
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.
"We are Microsoft. You shall be assimilated. Competition is futile."
LinuxBIOS/Coreboot will get a system up in 3 seconds or less.
But requires a motherboard compatible with coreboot. Which do you recommend buying?
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.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
I'm pretty sure there is a config switch for it too, but ALT+L works for me.
"We've discovered... the anti-cluon."
DRM: Terminator crops for your mind!
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.) .. And sometimes people don't need much more than that application offered.
Of course the new software is much more advanced, but the old mac did it faster
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?
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.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
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.