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Fastbooting Linux For Dummies?
Linux First timer writes "I wonder whether the Linux Gurus of Slashdot could help me with some advice on setting up a Linux system for my wife. She is not at all computer literate, but likes to get on the net for a few minutes every morning to read news etc. She is always bitching that our XP desktop takes way too long to boot 'just to get on the net for a few minutes.' I was thinking that I could take an old laptop we have, do a little first time test drive installing and using Linux, and possibly solve her problem in one go. The requirements for the system are simple: fast as possible boot/load Firefox, easy for a computer dummy to get onto the net, hard to break through random incompetence, and comes with Open Office.org or similar for occasional use. Wouldn't be used for much else. Any useful advice for us two poor Linux newbies? For example, is Ubuntu the best choice for this, or is there a better Linux flavour for the purpose? Any useful tweaks a novice can handle to make it work better for these simple tasks only?"
If you put your system in hibernation mode, the wake up process is much faster then a cold boot... My windows desktop wakes up in less than 5 secs. It boots in more the 3 min...
Just leave it up all night. I boot our XP system once a week if that.
"If it's real, then it gets more interesting the closer you examine it. If it's not real, just the opposite is true." -
winxp and hibernate. anything else is not kiss
Honestly my wife's XP box gets rebooted maybe 3-4 times a year. Otherwise it's just in powersave mode. Takes about 5 seconds to wake it up.
The decision of a Linux distro for old hardware is somewhat dependent on the age of the old hardware. I've been pretty successful at using PuppyLinux (and MacPup isn't too bad) on a very old Toshiba laptop with 192mb RAM. However, I have found that the "random incompetence" factor is an issue with it, as well as some laptop quirks (X refuses to come back if you close the laptop lid, and you then have to power it off, X doesn't start up on boot, and you have to type "startx" at the command line and chose xmesa or xorg...).
Xubuntu is actually not too bad from the resources side... I tried it on an old 256mb ram/celeron computer. It was pretty slow, though.
gOS also isn't too bad. It's geared towards getting online and using Google stuff... gmail, google docs, etc. It booted faster and the liveCD was faster than Xubuntu, for me.
Another one that I haven't used a whole lot but looked pretty good was TinyME (based on PCLinuxOS I think).
OMG! Thanks, I was completely unaware of this!!! We must stop him NOW!!! Come one guys!!! Thanks AC you just saved the world and as a sign of gratitude I will transfer $1,000,000 to your bank account!! ( How come these GOP bots still get to post the same SPAM every day and not get auto-trolled / banned automatically? ... come one, just add a moderation something like -1 SPAM that gets stored for future compare and auto-discard)...
I haven't messed around with this much myself... but instead of making her morning routine specific to an older, outdated laptop you have lying around, what about installing Linux on a USB drive for boot. Usually you can set Bios to detect USB first and installing something small and lightweight would be preferable. If you set up a Bash script to start Firefox I'd recommend Puppy Linux because it's quick and small, but if you want her to be able to mess around with the OS GUI and not "break" anything I think a better idea would be xubuntu instead. Still smaller and rather lightweight, but much more user friendly. The beauty of the USB drive boot though is you can use that old laptop as well as your main home computer without uprooting an existing OS and you'll still have access to all of those files if she wants to do work in OpenOffice or something similar.
Well, back to rejecting software patent applications.
Go check here for a list of minimalistic Linux distro's:
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Minimal_Linux_distros
Slackware with a XFCE and Firefox/OpenOffice is very, very fast on even older hardware.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
I get the impression that you don't want to spend too long fiddling with the Linux install. Ubuntu makes for a pretty simple install. It's boot time is significantly slower than alot of the other minimalistic distros, but it might be what you want if you are looking for foolproof installation. The linux community as a whole is supportive if you run into some roadblocks. As indicated elsewhere, Ubuntu might not be good if the hardware is too old.
bitching? that's not very nice
Presto (http://www.prestomypc.com) is suppose to be the fix for this case. You can try to sign up for the beta and give it a try.
Hi!
I've had very good experiences with boot times when installing the latests Debian distros. I do the following:
1.- Install Debian from scratch, and *only* with the base util (no X, no gnome, no anything)
2.- Install things on demand (X, fluxbox, firefox, OO...)
That is. It's been a very good choise for me. Luck!
I am a linux-lover and I would say Ubuntu is a great place to start. Its easy to install and does all the work for you. But heres a thought..buy your wifey a $80 30-gig HDD and shut off all the extra start-up crap on the XP and it will come up pretty quick.
Use Arch. There is extensive documentation and pacman is my favourite package manager.
It's not available yet, but Xandros Presto ( http://www.prestomypc.com/ ) is designed to do just this (boot quickly into a simple setup). The fast-boot parts are similar to those in the EeePC version of Xandros which does indeed get up and going really fast (whatever else you might think of Xandros) I'm skeptical about a lot of the suggestions for generic lightweight linux distributions, since even though these run on underpowered machines, few of them actually put any thought into optimizing boot time.
...boots very fast from a CDROM. It would be much faster from a hard disk or SSD.
link
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Try coreboot. I haven't tried it or looked to heavily into it, but I understand that it can take a certain "cargo" into the bios, and one of the possibilities for that cargo is a linux kernel. That'd boot quickly.
Find a half-decent SSD; note the recent Phoronix.com benchmark on Atom, which I believe was comparing moblin boot times.
SSD performance is a tricky subject, but since the Linux boot process generally involves touching many different files, the win in seek latency smokes a mechanical disk even with whatever cheap, MLC drives are being shipped in the current netbooks.
Performance with Windows might be less noticable because MS already put a bunch of work into using serialized, hibernation-type images to improve the boot performance starting with XP.
There are some projects re: serialized boot images or cache-packing ("preloading") with Linux, but I can't remember the names off the top of my head.
Of course, as others suggest, using a "minimal" distro will also help quite a bit. Try something like NetBSD with XFCE as a "benchmark," and see how close you can get with Linux. (If you go through this trouble, a writeup with stopwatch benchmarks would be interesting!)
You can set it to download updated weather, news and WiiMail while it's in standby mode, and you can check your webmail, [facebook|myspace|slashdot|whatever] if you spend $5 to download Opera for Devices. Get a usb keyboard and you're all set for posting as well.
If the TV is already on, it's probably quicker.
Suspend has been available on all machines for ages. I find it hard to believe that there are still people who never heard of it.
Boot time doesn't matter if you never shut the thing down.
Install LTSP on your home server, and use the laptop as a LTSP thin client. You'll reduce boot time because there's hardly anything running on the client machine, and probably get better performance once everything is running (assuming the server is faster then your old laptop).
http://www.prestomypc.com/ says it boots in eight seconds.
Just suspend. instant on. Done.
And silent, but not in the good way. I've seen two computers that cannot play sound after coming out of suspend, until the next restart.
Hi all,
I changed from XP a year or so back and found "Linux Mint" to be my favourite distribution, the fact that it is FREE is a bonus. You can download a copy from http://www.linuxmint.com/ and burn the ISO to a CD. It is possible to install the program as an "XP" program straight over windows to try it out, that way you can have both XP AND Mint! Just insert the CD while XP is running and follow the prompts. If you don't like it [unlikely] just remove it like any other XP program and things will restore to normal. When you boot up, you have a choice of running Mint or XP, click on the one you want and it is business as usual.
Mint comes with Firefox as standard, including Thunderbird for emails, all intuitive to use. Perfect for internet use plus there are thousands of free programs for just about anything.
A user Guide can be downloaded from http://www.linuxmint.com/ just click on "User Guide".
Have fun,
Griz.
Checked out lots of distros
PuppyLinux or one of its many forks.
Nuff Said....
I have a Wii. I try loading Slashdot in Internet Channel, and it freezes for 30 seconds while something runs. I suspect it's JavaScript or reflow related to Slashdot's tag system, the same thing that freezes Firefox on my desktop for a couple seconds. Besides, Internet Channel has no tabs, no Java (if the wife visits sites that use it), and no Flash Player 8 or 9 (if the wife visits sites that use it).
Debian boots in approximately one minute, even on pretty old hardware. If you spend some time removing unneeded services, removing the Grub timeout, and following some of the other boot optimization tips you find on the net, you can get it down to about half that.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
Random observations:
- Why reboot? Uptime on this (linux) notebook is currently 7 days. I usually only reboot a linux box ONLY when a software upgrade requires it. I haven't rebooted my (accursed) XP office-mandated notebook since February (more than three weeks).
- Suspend / Hibernation (OS independent comment) are your friends. XP comes back pretty fast, linux not necessarily so quickly, but still LOTS faster than a cold boot for either OS.
- The heaver the OS (XP or linux) and the apps runnning, the longer the boot times, or for that matter the recovery from hibernation / suspension. There are lots of resources on the t00bz for slimming down XP, or for minimal linux. For linux suspend to disk, remember you need a swap partition at least as large as your ram.
- According to Slickdeals , Dell is selling Mini-9 netbooks with a SSD and Ubuntu for $199. Why screw with antique hardware when new schtuff is that cheap. Remember, your time setting this up is worth money.
- You're (planning on) rebooting linux every morning why (again)?
Hope this helps......
Red
I've recently notice that the new Knoppix 6.0 (6.1 out soon) works really fast from my usb stick. The installation is easy and she won't be able to break anything. Well, the stick might literally break off, though.
Step 1. Download UNetBootin from SourceForge (2 minutes)
Step 2. Stick in a blank USB thumb drive and use UNetBootin to install Linux Mint version 6 or Puppy Linux version 4 onto the drive. (3 to 30 minutes depending on network speed)
Step 3. Reboot and tell your BIOS to make your newly bootable USB thumb drive the boot drive. (2 minutes)
http://tinyurl.com/4ny52
My wife uses an Ubuntu 8.10 laptop. Not a super-fast laptop either. I timed the cold boot to Firefox up & running, it comes in at 65 sec. That's not too shabby. It's got a bunch more things than just what you asked.
I then tried a hibernate, and it took 40 sec, of which 10 secs was the BIOS (could set that lower).
Next I tried a suspend, and it was 4 seconds. But I understand that 'suspend' takes a little bit of power when it's "off".
FWIW.
I've always used hibernate with Windows. There's no need shut down and boot up every day. I have Windows machines that are 6 years old and get rebooted about 5 times a year.
But you should try Linux Mint (google it). They just take Ubuntu after each release and make it even more user friendly. It's the perfect version of linux people who don't know anything about linux (like myself). And it has hibernate, too!
If you have an Asus motherboard it's branded as Express Gate. Some models have it in the flash bios, some require a 512 MB image file to be located on an NTFS partition (also the installer is windows). Either way, it boots really fast, 5-10 seconds.
It has Firefox and Skype, Pidgin and a photo viewer. When you exit, the system boots from the hard disk.
Over time your entire footprint of your windows system, applications and files, gets spread out of a large footprint of the hard disk. This literally means your average access times go up, as your hard disk has to read from one end to the other of the disk.
Defragging doesn't fix this, as even if files aren't fragmented and reasonably well placed on the drive, files are simply not longer clustered in say, the first 10% of your hard drive.
Updates to Windows also mess up your system file layout and footprint.
To fix: 1. Split your HDD into two partitions, a first partition of perhaps (10gb min), and a second one of the rest of your HDD - you'll need to relocate user profile folders to this partition perhaps.
2. Perform clean install of Windows XP that has been nlite'd (www.nliteos.com) to include streamlined service packs + drivers + delete unnecessary crap (language packs, foreign keyboards, speech support, legacy drivers)
3.Reboot a few times so prefetch speeds up boot and placement. Defrag (yes even a clean install needs it).
4. Install a minimal set of applications she likes.
5. ????
6. Enjoy snappy new system.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
Buy her one of the Asus Eee PCs that comes with Xandros Linux and leave the default O/S on it. More than enough for what she needs and boots up very quickly. Dead simple to use. Difficult to break. Then use the other laptop for yourself with whatever distro you might like to try
I have been using Ubuntu on all of my home computers for several years. It is very stable, easy to use, loads of free software, and no need to fear malware, etc... My 4 year old daughter can even use it with little difficulty, and I don't have to worry about her breaking it. So in short, I'd recommend a Ubuntu variant.
I have noticed in the BIOS before, that there is an option to have the computer turn on at a specific time. This would be handy if you set it for a time that would be a few minutes before you ordinarily need to use it.
Have you ever considered one of the netbooks that are out there? They are built just for this purpose.
It said "windows 98 or better" so I installed Linux
DSL linux boots insanely fast. On my pentium 2, 300Mhz machine it takes 28 seconds to cold boot off of a CD. And part of that is the delay at the grub prompt! Plus it fires up the applications like a mail client nearly instantly.
main difference is the graphics and dialog boxes are not as sexy as ubuntu
I note that one possible reason linux or windows boots slowly or wakes from hinernation slowly on an older machine can be it's memory starved. For example ubuntu boots on that machine in about ten minutes(!). the machine only has 396MB of memory so it's a miracle ubuntu even boots at all.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
I know you're asking about Linux, but booting Windows into a kiosk mode makes it boot faaast.
Just alter
HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon
Shell=pathtofirefox.exe
and whatever auto-logon guest type account for that shell.
Downsides: you won't be using it for anything else.
Upside: Two minutes of (reversible) changes, so least amount of work.
Recently I'd noticed that my main laptop (a Dell Inspiron E1505) was not quite as fast as I'd wanted. It is a CentOS 5.2 system running KDE. The main apps I use are Firefox, JEdit, VMWare/VirtualBox, konsole, xine/vlc.
I started with Firefox, since it's always running. First steps were to install NoScript and AdBlocker. With these installed, it seems like a completely different browser.
Next thing was to get rid of KDE. On other systems I use Fluxbox. This time I went with XFCE4. From the GDM screen to a ready system, XFCE4 takes about 4 seconds to load versus about 20s for KDE. Everything also seems a lot more responsive.
A more difficult thing was to get rid of konqueror. I like it as a file manager, but it seems to lag a bit. However, I quickly got used to the xfce4 file manager which is faster by a bit. For one thing, thumbnails appear much quicker with the xfce file manager. This may be because it re-uses other thumbnail caches though.
Then I started tweaking my network setup. From a browsing standpoint, this made a pretty good improvement. I have a local caching DNS server on my LAN. This in itself is worth having since frequently used pages are noticeably faster than hitting my ISPs nameserver. Next was to install squid proxy. This is harder to notice if you just have a single machine (in fact, may hinder performance in that case), but if you have multiple people using the pipe then the bandwidth usage change is significant. I tried adjusting TCP window size and various other tweaks (including those for Firefox), but didn't notice much difference. YMMV.
Of course, I also did away with lots of eye candy. For example, I disabled window manager animations, opaque window moves, etc.. I kept things like sub-pixel font settings because they make the experience better.
All the other things are probably noticeable. E.g., force compression on SSH connections, firefox page preload, disable unused services (gpm, sendmail, etc..). They don't use much resources when inactice, but perhaps the 10M or so of memory here and there can be used elsewhere.
I read "She is not at all computer literate" as "She is not a cumdumpster" THATS FUCKING IT, IM DONE WITH THE INTERNET
Back in the day I had a Mac running System 7. I could set it to turn on in the morning, dial up and get my mail and news (uupc :-).
Why can't we do that these days? Progress! Ha!
Another option would be for you to get up, turn on the PC, make breakfast and take it to her in bed. Although this can make you late for work.
The .iso is only 30 MB. You can install it on a memory stick and boot from it. It loads itself into memory at boot so it is pretty fast. Booting takes about 30 sec on my old hardware with a celeron cpu.
Check other distros at http://distrowatch.com/
I converted our desktop from XP to Ubuntu, and my wife, who had never used Linux before, has been doing fine. Ubuntu is a good distro for beginners, and I can certainly recommend it for your situation.
Don't use it, don't pay for it, don't support it.
Xubuntu 9.04 would be a bit faster at booting than Ubuntu 9.04, but there are several lightweight GUIs available. You can use a normal Ubuntu install and install the xubuntu-desktop metapackage to get it. Under System > Admin > Login Window, you can set automatic logins and other things (it also asks you if you want auto login during the install).
Promote true freedom - support standards and interoperability.
Title says it all. Ubuntu is nice and easy, but really doesn't boot too quickly compared to quite a few distros. The quickest boot you can get for a semi-normal distro is probably PuppyLinux. Besides booting pretty fast, the apps start VERY fast -- like 1-2 seconds for the slowest apps *on a P2*. P4? Apps just open instantly.
In the future you'll want to look at moblin or variants... it's mainly for netbooks (may actually use Atom-specific instructions for all I know...) but boots off a slow 5400RPM hard disk in under 10 seconds, and apparently 6 seconds off a SSD.
I m using Zenwalk www.zenwalk.com on a p3 desktop.. it s booting very fast on my old hardware, it s based on slackware and using Xfce. the last version installs Firefox and a stripped OO 3.0 version.
I set up a WindPC running Ubuntu for my mom at Christmas. I'll get a call every once in a while that something's not behaving properly (usually, it's not resuming from suspend). She's quite computer illiterate; the usual best fix is to have her hit ctl-alt-backspace and restart X (such as was the case when an app was frozen and stealing input focus, and I didn't have access to an IP network to kill the app). It happens in all software environments, not just Windows.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
BeOS 5 was (and maybe still is) the fastest OS to boot. It's open source legacy Haiku may work in your situation, and will likely run firefox. On an old 486, BeOS 5 would boot from power on to ready in less than 30 seconds, and was ready to use right away.
This is the standard of a Linux Newbie (from TFS)?? Recompiling the kernel, modifying startup scripts and understanding SSEx instruction sets?
It's too much. I'm quitting the Linux stuff and going back to Windows. I'm going to download Test King papers, memorize the answers, and get my MSCE certification. Experience and knowledge be damned!
On behalf of Slashdot, I apologize for the quality of some of the suggestions given. (Basically the readers here write what they want, instead of what you want.)
As you have discovered, the best suggestions tend to gather near the bottom of the HTML page (as they have fewer replies), while the trolling suggestions tend to gather near the top.
You write well. Hope you can be a regular contributor with us.
I'm not a linux user at all but the easiest solution to me just seem to keep you XP machine running all the time. Just turn the monitor off when not using it, a monitor only takes a couple of seconds to come on and there is no need to learn a new OS or try to fiddle with drivers that might not work.
My older Dell laptop with Ubuntu 8.10 wakes up from sleep in just a few seconds. When I leave Firefox open, it opens also with all of the tabs. I didn't have to fiddle with anything to get this working. I just set the power button to enter 'sleep' mode to make it easy to start and stop.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
What about checking the news on the mobile? It's on anyway.. With a bit of Wifi it would be fast and not costing any money...
Why is everyone rebooting? Just leave it on and reboot once a week if it is XP and about 45-60 days if it is Linux. Always on rules!
Organization: alphabetical, sometimes numerical or messy
That'd be one reason why.
Check out the Sessions and Services and untick those you KNOW that you dont need (tracker)... Other than that, whlie pc is booting, ask your wife to make coffee and it'll be up by the time she gets back :)
Perhaps you can try moblin:
http://moblin.org/
And here is the vmware image, if you want to testdrive it first.
http://fileforum.betanews.com/download/Moblin_VMWare-Image/1233245283/3
Linpus Lite on my Acer Aspire One boots really fast (10s). Cold boot seems to take even less time than waking up from stand by.
Typical linux community response. Instead to help the user, confuse the user (to hell).
Start an arugment for the sake of an argument and think that what you do is the best.
Can someone tell the exact figures without talking sh!t.... i.e. this is fast or that is fast? What and how do you guage FAST?
Anyways, Hibernate WindowsXP or Linux, and you will see good results in both the cases.
If you want to try linux, use Xfce + firefox on ubuntu is recommended. :)
If you want XP, make a new installation of XP or find some Window ME sh!t.
Just RAID the boot disk.
Hi..
Install lxde(Lightweight X11 Desktop Enviornment) on debian lenny, that can be use full or lxde on ubuntu.
The trick is to have a special hibernate swap partition that will be used to store a ready-to-use sytem (with Firefox up, etc), along with a normal swap.
Then hibernate the system to that hibernate swap partition, making sure that grub (or lilo) knows where to look for that special partition for restore. Also, make sure that your normal swap is setup in /etc/fstab. Now each time you reboot, the kernel will see your (read-only) special swap and wake up from hibernation in no time.
Your wife won't have to change a thing in her habits. She can still turn off the computer after use so that "she won't wear the hardware" (non-sense IMHO), but it will wake up from hibernation when turned on.
AC
Or you could just use hibernate.....I have one computer at one whose sole designation is to connect to the internet and check emails or the web, (in its own dmz zone)....I hate waiting, so I hibernate it when I am done with it...leaving everything as it was before hand. It takes me only 2 seconds to boot, and voila open pages, open outlook....presto!
Magic!
To the computer illiterate, everything smells like Windows
Power on... Get out stuff to make coffee... Log in... Finish making coffee... She ought to be ready to go. Just rethink her morning routine some.
"Be polite, be professional, but have a plan to kill everybody you meet." General James Mattis
My home desktop has 512Mb RAM and a Celeron D as a processor (ie, not cutting-edge). I run:
Windows XP fully patched with automatic updates from MS. No 3rd party AV (just use Limited User Accounts and you'll be safe as houses).
So long as you don't install tons of crap, basic Windows XP is a snappy, responsive and consistent OS. Chances are your wife already knows how to change desktop background, change volume, start program x, etc. No learning curve whatsoever. Other posters have told you what you need to know about hibernation. You can get OpenOffice.org for Windows. Job's a good 'un. Every piece of hardware you might currently own or wish to buy in the future will run with Windows. This is, ahem, not always the case with Linux - be prepared to have to fiddle with stuff.
I also dual-boot with Ubuntu. I like Ubuntu for several things - copying DVD's without having to fork out for AnyDVD, the Synaptic Package Manager - the biggest free-as-in-beer software catalogue in the worrrrrrrrrrrld, the choice of filesystems.
However, I don't see any real difference in performance or boot times on either OS. For that reason, I'm reticent to advise installing Linux to be a magic bullet for boot time woes. If you're looking for an excuse to try a flavour of Linux on the other hand, be my guest. Oh, and I tried Xubuntu but it didn't have much of a performance advantage compared to Ubuntu.
I also run Puppy Linux and have found it to be incredibly responsive, even on old hardware. You can run it off a live CD to see how compatible it is with your machine and you can even store the boot file on the file system of an NTFS-formatted disk (so you don't need to go through a lengthy partition/install phase if you want it permanently available as a boot option). I personally like SeaMonkey (the default browser in Puppy), though it's not to everyone's taste.
As the title implies though, I'd stick with streamlining Windows and getting used to hibernating rather than shutting down. Sometimes, the path of least resistance can in fact be the optimal solution (which is what every geek worthy of the name should choose).
Squirrel!
If you want to get her to Linux, a few things:
first, turn off all services that get started on bootup she'll never use, such as apache (if it's installed), or a d/b (ditto).
Next, and everyone will have their own favs here, I use IceWM as a window manager. Unlike the 12M or whatever of KDE, it's 600k, and comes up *far* faster, since it also doesn't start half a dozen heavyweight processes. Has a few little nicities, like the system monitor on the toolbar. My only irritation with it is that it does *not* return your windows to the position they were in when you shut down.
Third: thunderbird. On her existing XP, I *hope* she's not using virusspreaderExpress, er, Lookout Express.... But even so, at work, I've got Office 2007, and Outlook is a *dog*; in addition, it's clear to me that M$ did it *again*: wrote slow bloatware, and so to speed it up, they're making direct hardware calls, *not* system calls (I get that from the fact that the system hangs while it's coming up and trying to connect to the Exchange server). T-bird, for its faults (I *loathe* that they're trying to make it look like Outlook), is reasonably fast.
Firefox, of course.
Oh, and if, for some reason, she needs a console, screw Konsole: use rxvt, which is *way* faster on coming up, and a normal x window.
mark
Damn Small Linux sounds like a good choice, has been mentioned before just adding my recommendation for it. Boots fast very small foot print and has basic word processor, email client, and firefox, all which run pretty quick.
If I were you, I'd install Archlinux + XFCE on that. That would almost surely be fast as hell, but for a linux newbie impossible to achieve. If you want something really easy to install, try Xubuntu (it's Ubuntu with a different, lighter desktop) or maybe even U-lite (an Ubuntu-based distro, trimmed for performance). Whatever you do, have fun! :)
I think in this case it's all about the hard drive. A SSD (Solid-State) at around 40GB would be enough to boot up the laptop in around 30 seconds from scratch, and wake-up would be instant. As for putting it in the old laptop, it should be possible with a few tweaks.
I used to have an old PIII 500MHz laptop with 128+256MB RAM, and Puppy Linux was a perfect operating system for it. You can boot very fast (about 15 sec.), and it loads itself to RAM after booting (if there's enough RAM space) and after that it's blazingly fast. There are open office add-ons and even a lot of Puplets (puppy derivatives) each focusing on different applications/window manages. Puppy easily can reside on a windows/linux partition without a need to alter the current HDD configurations. It can even stay on a re-writable CD/DVD if you prefer or a USB pen drive. The only down-side I had with Puppy was that it always runs under root account.
"However, I don't see any real difference in performance or boot times on either OS. For that reason, I'm reticent to advise installing Linux to be a magic bullet for boot time woes"
There is a difference and you can tweak Linux to get that little more performance on old hardware. Secondly your wife won't risk having her online identity stolen in some drive-by phishing attempt. One of the fastest put-of-the-box solution I've seen is Yoper
davecb5620@gmail.com
Install and use the XFCE Community Edition. I've got it running on an old pentium II Sony laptop and it boots in 50 seconds to where I'm on the internet. Using the built in package manager, remove the older Open Office version, and install the newest 3.0.1 or higher. With Mint, you'll be pleased in the future when you insert a CD or DVD and it plays almost everything nicely :)
Use Moblin, it boots in seconds!
It's really amazing...
The ultimate hack:
Change your morning routine and let the computer be. Push the button, jump in the shower. Check the news and emails when you get out.
It's just not a tech problem!
Hi All, Let's get back to the point - isn't there a Linux tool to get that quick boot going. I know that several organizations are working on it. There is a lot of things to be gained here - especially electricity costs, plus that frustration. Booting into the Internet - where we all live - should not take 5 minutes. I could show several things from my blog, but don't dare.
JJMacey On The Jersey Shore
take a look at crunchbang linux. most linux distributions don't include flash player, a java VM, or mp3 play capabilities (by default). crunchbang not only include these, but is much faster than Xubuntu.
boot a fast booting linux OS off a new-fangled SSD like the $80 32 gig SSD you can get over at newegg.com. no moving parts, plus fast booting OS, equals even faster booting OS.
i'm talking 4-10 seconds after the BIOS loads.
just remember to put your swap partition and temp directories on a normal hard drive, since the cheap solid state hard drives dont like multiple write requests.
(i hear they freeze up, but i installed with a separate hard drive for the swap and temps and i've suffered ZERO freezes)
win XP requires a few more tweaks when booting off a cheap SSD, but it runs much faster too.
Just install xandros presto. The beta is free on their site, it installs right from windows, boots in about 10 seconds, and comes with open office, firefox, and some instant messaging software preinstalled.
Why do so many people feel hibernate is an acceptable alternative, it is wasteful, adds unnecessary costs to computing, and isn't what was asked for? I have been looking for something similar for some time and have also received similar (in my opinion, stupid) responses that singularly fail to meet my requirements.
Unfortunately, I can't offer any advice as I am still looking myself. I was going to try Presto as mentioned above, but discovered you can only download an .exe file, and haven't worked out if there is a way to get the installer to play nicely with Linux yet.
If your hardware is compatible, BeOS (now hayku) boots under 10 sec on my old machine. you could run Opera as a browser and voila. I dont think any malware was ever made for that platform.
just a tought ...
wake-up the pc half an hour before your wife.
Even old BIOSes can do this.
for example :
Every day at 7:00am
Guy
If you're looking for a very lightweight Linux distribution, Arch Linux is definitely the way to go. I have tried a ton of distros in the last several years and Arch is the only one I can recommend wholeheartedly.
Arch Linux is not for those who want a system up and running in 5 minutes. It requires a good deal of configuration (X isn't installed by default, for example), but there are very detailed and easy-to-follow installation guides available on the distro's wiki.
The main advantages are as follows:
1. Once you install Arch, you will never have to "upgrade it" by burning a new CD and booting from that. To keep your system fully up-to-date, you only need to use the package manager (pacman): "pacman -Syu" will update your entire system for you.
2. Arch uses the latest versions of almost everything. Some may not like this fact, but personally, I hate using old versions of software.
3. The "Arch Way" is based on elegance--that is, providing the best balance between customizability. For example, if you become interested in creating your own packages for software and submitting them to the Arch User Repo, you will find that you need to create a single "PKGBUILD" file that has a couple of configuration switches and a few lines of shell code.
4. Arch is designed to be as flexible as possible. Unlike many other distributions, Arch doesn't have distro-specific configurations for its software, so it takes less work to customize your system exactly the way you want it. The packages are pretty vanilla, so any bugs you may find usually are not caused by conflicts due to the distro's developers.
There are many more advantages, but those are the first few that come to my mind.
I encourage you to spend some time playing around with Arch (try installing it in a VM if you'd like). If you run into trouble, the community is very friendly.
since my login is not working i will have to post as this.
I was wondering if you took a look at your computer bios to see if it will allow a boot up time for you.
This could help you avoid any issues. Just as long as the system clock is good and you have this option then you should have no worries.
One other thing you will have to do is set a default user for the autologin startup in xp.
So this might help you avoid dual booting or booting from a live cd.
Have a good one.
Ubuntu 6.06 dapper drake is a good choice.
There are a number of suggestions on this forum for getting blazing fast boot speed (tinycore from ssd, puppy linux, fvwm + recompiled kernel) but they are not for newbies.
6.06 is a tradeoff - it will be a bit slower than the expert solutions to boot, but it will be a LOT easier for a newbie to install, use and maintain.
Why 6.06 rather than a recent version of Ubuntu? 6.06 was a lot leaner - less features, less services enabled by default (both in the OS and the browser) = faster booting. The resource footprint is lower, and it will run a bit better on older hardware. Also, 6.06 is a long term support release. Although it is old it is still supported now. Note that support for the desktop version (that you will probably use) will end in a few months (June of 2009). This shouldn't be a problem for something that is set up to be just a web browsing platform.
Here's something that requires a bit more work & knowhow but can get you faster performance. Install 6.06 server edition, then install just the bare minimum extra you need for a gui desktop. If memory serves, the command you would use to do the 2nd step is:
sudo apt-get install x-window-server gdm gnome nautilus metacity synaptic firefox
It will take a while to download & install all of those packages because they have a lot of dependencies.
friends don't let friends teleport drunk
If all she's doing is surfing, then maybe looking into Splashtop would be an idea.
Almost instant on, and you get access to browser, skype, IM and photo organizing tool.
My new motherboard has it and it is on and usable in about 5 seconds.