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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?"
Who boots up anymore unless to fix/install something? Just hibernate. I know, I'm over generalising but still, I rarely reboot/boot my machine perhaps once a fortnight I just hibernate it. * Windows XP
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.
Whale
I am fairly sure faster boot times wont cause most people to switch. For most people it comes down to being able to run their apps, and not the sometimes poor GNU replacements of their apps.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Although I agree that a shorter boot time would be attractive, I doubt this will increase the number of people using Linux. A lot of the resistance to using Linux is tied up in the number of applications that don't port to the operating system, not the boot time. It doesn't matter how quickly the OS is available if you can't do anything once it turns on. If you could make it so that the majority of windows applications ran without resistance, I think that almost no boot time could make Linux revolutionary. Until then, I think you're wasting man hours on the wrong problem.
Based on the copyright ("Copyright (c) 2009 Xandros Incorporated") I would venture to guess that Presto Linux comes out of Xandros Linux.
Speaking as someone who owns a relatively new PC, XP, Vista, and 7 boot faster than the 'flasghip' Ubuntu. Not that it matters really.
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.
Several companies offer such functionality in their computer BIOSes. Sony's stupidly named XrossMediaBar that they install on everything from PS3s to televisions as well as some laptops being a prime example. These people are probably out of luck as if anybody actually wants this kind of feature, it will start to be provided in more and more BIOSes. Sure, the BIOS mini-OSes don't have the "app store" extensibility (although there's no reason why they couldn't), but, well good luck with that. And if (as I suspect) nobody is really interested because suspend/hibernate is plenty fast enough, then they're still buggered.
Oh no... it's the future.
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.
This will only impress the type of douchebag who lists his RAM timings in his tweaker forum sig. People aren't using Windows because it boots fast, they use it because it came with their PC, and they can bootleg Office from work, and play Snood.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
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).
Evidently, the key to understanding recursion is to begin by understanding recursion. The rest is easy.
I had a fast boot time on Xandros. But the packages in the repositories weren't up to date and there were very few applications to install without breaking the system. Yes I enjoyed the fast boot times but what's the point of having fast boot times if your computer is completely useless. Installing Ubuntu was pretty easy and gave me access to some more up to date software but then then the Ubuntu repositories are barely up to date. The next netbook I get will be a windows one with a bigger hard disk so I can dual boot. I don't want to be limited by the OS I use.
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.
Linspire is now part of Xandros. This is them.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
Ok, you could probably somebody an operating system that boots in 2 seconds and does nothing. But, I guarantee you that within a month the vast majority of people will load up their computers with a bunch of crap such that they will still take a minute to boot.
This is my sig.
Are you kidding? When is the last time you used OpenOffice.org? If the version number was earlier than 2.4.0, I might agree with you; but OOo is at 3.0.1 now and it's quite good and fully integrated as a replacement for all MS Office -- the only thing it doesn't do well are Excel macros, and that's for a reason: they're broken and easily replaced. As for database apps, with Office you have Access, which is fine for very small databases, but more than a few thousand records you need to look at SQL anyway, which if you recall is a standard array of functionality (designed on purpose), so MySQL can do the job pretty well as MS' SQL Server, and sometimes better.
...and drawing apps
What MS Office drawing app are you referring to? Would that be Paint? Paint is a POS, and even MS knows that (they really ought to replace it with Paint.NET)
I can replace all my Office apps with free alternatives:
MS Word = OpenOffice.org Writer
MS Excel = OpenOffice.org Calc
MS Access = OpenOffice.org Base
MS PowerPoint = OpenOffice.org Impress
MS Publisher = Scribus
MS Outlook = Evolution
MS Paint = GIMP or OpenOffice.org Draw
Adobe Illustrator = Inkscape
Adobe Acrobat = (practically any Linux application can create a PDF or PS file)
The list can go on, and others here can easily tell you more applications, I only wanted to harp in on a few that you might be interested in (or didn't even think about.) The days of MS Office being the be-all-end-all of office application suites is over and has been for a while now.
First: Who gives a shit if it's booting in half the time?
I press power once between standing up and breakfast (on). And once before going to bed (off).
It already boots faster than my brain. ^^
Second: This is very old news. This quick-boot "technique" (aka horrible hack). Exists for a long time now.
Besides: If I wanted to boot fast, I'd do it right, and use hibernation for the power button and long times of inactivity, and sleep for short times. With an optional real reboot (in case of kernel updates) between pressing the power button and going to hibernate (after being booted up again).
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Every time there is a discussion about boot times, someone very much like yourself comes out with the old chestnut of "are you so important and impatient that you can't wait 30 seconds for a PC to boot". I assume you guys have a secret clubhouse somewhere where you meet to discuss your strategy for defending the indefensible, but anyway...
Could this logic not be applied to any situation? E.g. you double click on an icon to start a program and your computer needlessly pauses for 15-30 seconds - but don't get mad, after all your life isn't so full that you can't wait less than a minute, right?
I honestly don't know what the crap PCs are doing in that 30-40 seconds. If it's scanning for hardware changes, well, newsflash, most people don't change their hardware every time they boot. I do know this: I currently have a clean XPSP2 installation on a system based on an AMD Phenom II 940, and it boots to desktop in under 15 seconds. Yet my last PC (Athlon XP 3000+) somehow took 40 seconds to boot to desktop. There is something totally arbitrary and unneccessary happening on most Windows machines which makes them boot much more slowly than they need to.
Read Pynchon.
If they haven't "cracked" the protocol by now, they aren't going to.
For a site about things like basic rights, Slashdot users sure do like to censor "dissent".
images of the latest release are here:
http://moblin.org/documentation/getting-started-guides/test-drive-moblin
If you want to win over windows users:
Make ONE distro - Part of what make Windows so useful is that i know how to use every windows machine i see. They're all pretty damn similar. Instead of making a bunch of distros that can't compete, make ONE that can. All the flavors are confusing. Windows has 3 basic flavors, home, domain and server. Aim for that.
Make it run Halo, Planetside, MS Office and the games that don't work on consoles. FPS and RTS games just aren't the same with console controls. What this really means is: driver support for video cards. And NO, i don't want OO.o. i use it when i can, but it just isn't a competitor for MSO. So either get OO.o ready for prime time, or work with MS.
i'd love to not pay 100$ to 200$ for the OS, but i'd rather have a system that can DO THINGS. That can run my games and interact with the rest of the world.
Utilizing the synergization of benchmark e-solutions to pre-workaround action items!