My call for a fast booting distro

[AK Dave]

3. MANAGE AUTOMATIC CONNECTION AT AN HIDDEN NETWORK. Xpud would be great for me but I have to manually connect to the hdden wifi network. I loose there all the precious seconds gained with the fast boot.

Any suggestions ?

Get rid of the "hidden" in your wifi network.

[AK Dave]

E4rat is a tool to get faster boot times on an existing distro. It is indeed not a distro by itself. Agreed, it may not be very simple to use for people new to Linux.

Useful in certain circumstances:
1. You must be using EXT4
2. No effect if your /boot and /root are on SSD or Flash media.

[AK Dave]

3. MANAGE AUTOMATIC CONNECTION AT AN HIDDEN NETWORK. Xpud would be great for me but I have to manually connect to the hdden wifi network. I loose there all the precious seconds gained with the fast boot.

Honestly, this depends more on your network and the kernel module you're loading to connect to your wifi network than anything else.

I have a netbook and a laptop upstairs in my house, both set to auto-connect to the same non-hidden WPA2-encrypted -g network. I can bring both computers up from suspend under identical conditions: same distro & version, same network manager, etc. The netbook will be connected to the network as soon as I'm logged in. Immediately. Bam. No delay. The laptop takes 20-30 seconds to negotiate the same connection. What is different between the two computers? They have different wifi cards, and thus different kernel modules.

[mychance]

E4rat is a tool to get faster boot times on an existing distro. It is indeed not a distro by itself. Agreed, it may not be very simple to use for people new to Linux.

I have found a good tutorial about E4rat and finally decided to install it and try it for a spin. I first wanted to install it in my Bodhi distro, which is an other super fast boot distro but with a quite lond delay for the network login, but it wouldn't, saying that it went into conflict with "ureadahead" package. I tried to install it with Mint, same conflict. I went back to Bodhi, uninstalled "ureadahead" package, tried to install E4rat but then, it complained about some library dependency.

I gave up.

Seemed like to be a very promising idea though.

[JordanV0712]

You can use Chrome OS.

Ok now jokes aside, I have found that Linux Mint 10 on my machine boots up within 25 secs. So I would assume Mint XFCE or something else along those lines would boot up rather quickly.

[Spier]

If you need fast distro..you need Austrumi linux.

[nunol]

Meego 1.1 was my best choice up to now, although its interface may not be my best cup ot tea. It loaded in about 20 seconds or so on my netbook with the network already logged in. Unfortunalety I have lost the promptitude with the first upgrade. I still boots fast, but I have to wait many seconds for the network to connect.

I found that the new MeeGo 1.2 is much slower... now it takes about 35 seconds to boot.

[steev]

Just tried out e4rat on my Slackware netbook that has a slow 5400rpm hard drive.

My boot time is now about 57 seconds (from the time I turn the power on to a full KDE desktop connected to the internet)
Maybe about 10 seconds of that was the firmware/bootloader. I didn't check my boot time before using e4rat, but it wasn't noticeably slower to me.

If boot time is important to you, I think investing in an SSD is your best option.