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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." -
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).
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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"
Huh?
Do they even MAKE 30 gig HDDs any more?
An 80 gig is $35.00, 250 gig is $45, 320 gig is $50, 500 gig is $60, 640 gig is $70, 750 gig is $85, 1 TB is $90, and 1.5 TB is $130.
Heck, for $100 you can buy a 32 gig SSD.
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
The problem with suspend is that you don't get a clean boot next time around - any memory you've leaked, and any processes that are a bit fscked up, will continue to be that way.
That being said, I was surprised with how opensuse handled going into suspend when I forgot to plug it in when doing a 5 gig update (I've got a lot of crap installed :-) ... after a couple of hours, the laptop started beeping ... I ignored it. Next morning ... "oh, crap!" Plugged it in, it resumed downloading packages where it had left off.
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
I assume he meant SSD.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
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 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.
I'm in the beta, and while it has a few shortcomings where I would much prefer to be using Ubuntu, the 10 second boot is amazing and firefox seems to not only start up really fast, but also seems to load pages faster as well than firefox under windows and ubuntu... assuming this company fully advertises it when its released they could make a killing (supposedly it will be a mere $20 to purchase, but hopefully they will also release a version you can install without requiring a windows install)
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.
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/
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.
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
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.
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?
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
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
I am also using the Beta of Presto for my wife. She has been so impressed with it! The only shortcoming that I found so far is the lack of support for samba shares. It installs right over Windows XP, so you still have the option (it in fact installs from WITHIN Windows, and uses the Windows boot loader). It was by far the easiest linux install I have ever done. I would reccomend trying it out. My wife was impressed, maybe your wife would be too!
.sig
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! :)
"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
Use Moblin, it boots in seconds!
It's really amazing...
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.
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.
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