Quick Boot Linux Hopes To Win Over Windows Users

Al writes "A company called Presto hopes to exploit the painful amount of time it takes for Windows computers to start up by offering a streamlined version of Linux that boots in just seconds. Presto's distro comes with Firefox, Skype and other goodies pre-installed and the company has also created an app store so that users can install only what they really need. The software was demonstrated at this year's Demo conference in Palm Desert, CA. Interestingly, the company barely mentions the name Linux on its website. Is this a clever stealth-marketing ploy for converting Windows users to Linux?"

Comments

Who reboots?

[qoncept]

I feel like this is too minor of a feature and too late to do any good. Windows 7 is apparently making huge strides toward reducing boot time, and I never hear anyone complain about boot time anyway. Including people who don't use the computer that much. Most of the people I know that aren't "computer people" leave their computer on or in standby/hibernate, so boot time is hardly an issue.

Re:Who reboots?

[David Gerard]

Bollocks it's making huge strides toward reducing boot time. You wouldn't be saying that if you'd actually tried the beta (I'm presuming you haven't from "apparently," which implies you don't actually know hands-on). It's responsive and usable once booted, but takes bloody forever to actually get there.

Xandros

[CannonballHead]

Based on the copyright ("Copyright (c) 2009 Xandros Incorporated") I would venture to guess that Presto Linux comes out of Xandros Linux.

Re:Boot Time is the least of the pain.

[mr_mischief]

If you had looked at the site for about 45 seconds, you could have noticed that the product installs in a dual-boot setup and gives the option to boot into Windows. It's not a new company called PResto, BTW. It's a product called Presto from Xandros, which has been putting out their own Linux distro for years.

"painful amount of time....."

[Anonymous Coward]

Speaking as someone who owns a relatively new PC, XP, Vista, and 7 boot faster than the 'flasghip' Ubuntu. Not that it matters really.

Re:"painful amount of time....."

[RulerOf]

The important thing with Linux is, that you can choose how much you system takes to boot up.

You can do the same thing with XP or Vista. The difference is that you need to do it with a third party tool, but nonetheless, paring down your OS is a power user task, and power users are the kind of folks who download said tools.

My preferred copy of XP right now is one I stripped down with nLite. Boots in 13 seconds on a 1 GHz P3 machine. I need to rebuild it with new patches, though.

Re:"painful amount of time....."

[Anonymous Coward]

The important thing with Linux is, that you can choose how much you system takes to boot up. It's allways a tradeoff between features, bling-bling and speed.

...uh it's the same with windows. If you don't need certain services starting up with your Windows box, disable them. If you don't need extra apps loading with windows, turn them off via msconfig.

TFA Almost burns.

[Useful Wheat]

From TFA

One of the main reasons why modern operating systems take so long to boot is that they are very bulky: a huge amount of code needs to be read when a computer is first turned on. Consisting of far fewer lines of code than Windows, Presto needs just a few hundred megabytes of memory, says Jordan Smith, product marketing manager at Xandros. Microsoft's Vista operating system, in contrast, recommends at least 15 gigabytes of free disk space to install.

I don't think the reviewer really understands what's happening here. Recommended amount of hard drive space is not installed space (although I'm aware that Vista is a beast). And the reviewer has apparently compared RAM to HD space.

Re:MacBook Pro?

[AndrewNeo]

it does a 'dual path' of both sleep and hibernation most of the time.

Windows so intelligently will run the battery dead in sleep and then lose everything.

So does Windows Vista. It's called hybrid sleep.

Re:Don the Tinfoil

[Workaphobia]

I don't understand why you need a bootloader in the BIOS. It's not enough to have one on the MBR of the primary disk? It'd be a nice feature to have, yes, but hardly a necessary one.

I'd prefer BIOS and motherboard vendors get their act together on reducing the time between powerup and entering the boot loader. My ASUS board takes way too long; it's half my boot time (although some of that may be delays in grub loading itself).

Re:Don the Tinfoil

[domatic]

Almost every BIOS I've seen in the past four years has a key you can press to do just that. Each separate drive does have to have it's own bootloader. Booting off a different partition on the same drive isn't a job for the BIOS IMHO. That is what bootloaders are for.

Re:Hibernation?

[TheRaven64]

Why on earth would you regularly boot a netbook? Doesn't it sleep when you close the lid and wake when you open it?

Re:Hibernation?

[PitaBred]

ACPI isn't friendly. Since all mobo manufacturers make their own quirky implementations that they provide drivers for Windows for, so things tend to work better on XP. Linux is stuck reverse-engineering that stuff. Some machines work well, some don't. The worse your machine works, the further from ACPI specs you know it is.

Re:Hibernation?

[FredFredrickson]

Hibernating with 1 gb of memory still takes a long time. Sleep still drains battery.

Re:Hibernation?

[shutdown -p now]

See, the immigrants don't care that much about a living wage, because they aren't citizens and they don't plan to stay.

An immigrant is, by definition of the word, someone who plans to stay.

Re:moblin

[sofar]

images of the latest release are here:

http://moblin.org/documentation/getting-started-guides/test-drive-moblin