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Fastbooting Linux For Dummies?

Posted by timothy on from the every-second-counts dept.

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?"

21 of 241 comments (clear)

  1. hibernate instead of shutting down... by fasuin · · Score: 5, Informative

    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...

    1. Re:hibernate instead of shutting down... by psnyder · · Score: 4, Informative

      I agree on the hibernation.

      But from the perspective of a cold boot:
      I have WinXP and Ubuntu dual-boot on my 5 year old system. I timed their bootup the other day. WinXP took approx 3 and a half minutes, Ubuntu took approx 1 and a half minutes.

    2. Re:hibernate instead of shutting down... by Tubal-Cain · · Score: 4, Informative

      For me, waking from hibernation is no faster than a cold boot.

    3. Re:hibernate instead of shutting down... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

      Just suspend. instant on. Done.

    4. Re:hibernate instead of shutting down... by clang_jangle · · Score: 4, Informative

      IME xubuntu is great for booting quickly and working well with older hardware. And if you feel up to tackling a kernel recompile, you can make it boot even faster.

      --
      Caveat Utilitor
    5. Re:hibernate instead of shutting down... by Darkness404 · · Score: 2, Informative

      One of the reasons why Linux always seems so "slow" booting is because by the time X is loaded, everything is ready to go. By the time explorer.exe loads on Windows, the system is still in fact, booting up (which is why you have to wait a minute before you really do anything). Secondly, on the hardware you have achieved the "overkill" for both systems. For daily, non CPU intensive applications, a decent CPU and 2 gigs of RAM is going to make XP and Ubuntu seem fast. The reason why it doesn't seem faster is because there really isn't that much more "fast" then it can go for daily tasks. On the other hand, if you try gaming or other demanding tasks, you may see a difference.

      --
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    6. Re:hibernate instead of shutting down... by mr_mischief · · Score: 2, Informative

      Download Puppy and run the live CD for a day sometime. You'll think KDE 4 is a half-dead slug. KDE 3 is a spritely, healthy slug compared to JWM, but still a slug.

  2. Why do you boot XP every morning? by godless+dave · · Score: 2, Informative

    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." -
    1. Re:Why do you boot XP every morning? by Nimey · · Score: 2, Informative

      Suspend-to-RAM. Comes up faster than hibernate, and sucks minimal power as long as you remember to shut the monitor off. On mine the only thing getting power is the RAM; the fans and drives are all turned off.

      --
      Hail Eris, full of mischief...

      E pluribus sanguinem
    2. Re:Why do you boot XP every morning? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

      Just leave it up all night. I boot our XP system once a week if that.

      Did you note, you'll be wasting equal amount of electricity as a printer printing 10000 pages if you leave your computer on all night long?

      Guys, help conserve energy.

  3. How old of a laptop? by CannonballHead · · Score: 4, Informative

    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).

  4. Have you thought about a USB bootloader? by CaptainPatent · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.
    1. Re:Have you thought about a USB bootloader? by CaptainPatent · · Score: 4, Informative

      usb will be slow to boot

      Actually it depends. USB 2.0 itself has a maximum throughput of 420Mbit/sec. To put that in perspective, it's nearly identical to most 7200 RPM hard drives on the market right now and about half as fast as a Western Digital Velociraptor VR150 which is one of the fastest consumer hard drives on the market.

      (60MB/s == 480Mb/s) I do admit this solution breaks down in two situations:
      1) you cheap out on the flash drive - in order to do this with reasonable speed you'll need to get a high-speed USB stick, but honestly a 2GB or 4GB high-speed stick is not that expensive
      2) The computer is not USB 2.0 compliant. - This is only a problem for older hardware, but if their normal home computer was made in the last 8 years, they should be safe.

      --
      Well, back to rejecting software patent applications.
  5. What's the hardware? by guruevi · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

    --
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    1. Re:What's the hardware? by gbarules2999 · · Score: 5, Informative

      "Slackware with a XFCE and Firefox/OpenOffice" = Zenwalk. Easier than Slackware itself; comes with a few extra tools. http://www.zenwalk.org/

  6. tinycore linux by MichaelSmith · · Score: 4, Informative

    ...boots very fast from a CDROM. It would be much faster from a hard disk or SSD.

    link

    --
    http://michaelsmith.id.au
    1. Re:tinycore linux by gbarules2999 · · Score: 3, Informative

      I suppost this comment. Tiny Core, plus Opera, is as fast as it gets. Also: Puppy Linux, or anything based on Slackware (Slackware itself, not quite for newbies).

  7. Xandros Presto! by NynexNinja · · Score: 3, Informative

    http://www.prestomypc.com/ says it boots in eight seconds.

  8. Wii takes a while to render anything by tepples · · Score: 2, Informative

    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).

  9. Auto Power On by sleekware · · Score: 2, Informative

    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.

  10. Damn small linux by goombah99 · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

    --
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