Good (and easy to install) fast boot OS

Golf1.6 · 20 Oct 2014 at 19:39

I'd like to install a fast boot OS onto my asus laptop so I can quickly log in and check email and the like.

I experimented with google chrome but it has some issues. Chromium OS was designed to be a primary OS and has trouble working correctly.

So I'm going to bin that idea and install something else.

The motherboard on my laptop supports fast boot OS, and there is a button for it and I've managed to install grub to inject the boot command.

So I am looking for a simple a straightforward linux based OS that is very light and designed to boot in 10 seconds or less.

Any suggestions?

stopper · 20 Oct 2014 at 20:46

Light and fast, Lubuntu.
To be quite honest though, all linux distro's boot real fast compared to the competition.

OhEsEcks · 20 Oct 2014 at 21:54

stopper said:
Light and fast, Lubuntu.
To be quite honest though, all linux distro's boot real fast compared to the competition.

I think he's talking about those Linux distros that came on certain laptops you could boot into before Windows. Asus had splashtop / express gate.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Splashtop

Golf1.6 · 20 Oct 2014 at 22:22

OhEsEcks said:
I think he's talking about those Linux distros that came on certain laptops you could boot into before Windows. Asus had splashtop / express gate.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Splashtop

no no, splashtop is terrible, doesn't even save wifi logins.

I've found a hack that will use splashtop bootlader and then use it to boot any other linux distro.

I will try lubuntu

OhEsEcks · 20 Oct 2014 at 22:45

Have a look through these too;

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightweight_Linux_distribution

Although, if you're accustomed to Ubuntu / Debian a derivative or spin off will probably make the most sense for ease of use. So Lubuntu or Crunchbang would be some of the lightest "main" distros.

Golf1.6 · 22 Oct 2014 at 13:01

had an issue with lubuntu, it would not allow me to select an install partition, it detected windows 7 but even then let me choose whether to replace windows 7 or install alongside it, i chose to install with window 7 but no partition choice was given.

I aborted the installation as the bootloader for fast boot requires the OS to be in an ext2/4 partition and not NTFS

Golf1.6 · 22 Oct 2014 at 13:02

To be honest, I think I'm going to give up trying to install a custom fast boot OS. I think I'm just getting a bit carried away with another "project".

WIndows 7 is reasonably fast with the curcial m4 ssd.

stopper · 22 Oct 2014 at 13:40

What did you want to do with the partition exactly?
Because installing along side windows is fully automated and will format the spare (unpartitioned) space as ext, Linux doesn't use NTFS but it can read it.
Either that or you could have just chose the "some thing else" option at the bottom which would have gave you access to the drives and partition manager.
Don't give up so easily!

mortals · 22 Oct 2014 at 13:52

Golf1.6 said:
I'd like to install a fast boot OS onto my asus laptop so I can quickly log in and check email and the like.

Golf1.6 said:
So I am looking for a simple a straightforward linux based OS that is very light and designed to boot in 10 seconds or less.

I can boot archlinux in around 10 seconds on my pc (which has a 7200rpm drive)

Code:

> STARTUP TIME: 7.672s (systemd-analyze)
>               2.007s (kernel) + 5.665s (userspace)

Probably a lot quicker on a SSD

I have a chromebook (with a SSD) with coreboot bios which boots archlinux in under 10 seconds also but it's probably not considered easy to install

Would think most linux variants would be able to boot quickly, another way to boot quickly is to use a ramdisk image

(some livecd's have this option)
I think it's called toram :confused:

(boot to ram)

Golf1.6 said:
I experimented with google chrome but it has some issues. Chromium OS was designed to be a primary OS and has trouble working correctly.

I had ChromeOS on the chromebook and it was OK but way too limited and used over 1GB of RAM from startup

Golf1.6 · 22 Oct 2014 at 16:34

mortals said:
I had ChromeOS on the chromebook and it was OK but way too limited and used over 1GB of RAM from startup

The difficulty with chromium os is it's a Google OS so computer enthusaists aren't so fond of it just like they're not so fond of MS products because it's not open source.

So there is very little support for it. Just like Apple products, Chromium OS is designed to work on select few hardware. So if you are trying to mod it or do anything creative you're just straight out of luck.

Linux is OK but I haven't had much luck with it to date.

It needs to be a fast boot OS and not on dual boot, which is what I'm having difficulty with.

mortals · 22 Oct 2014 at 17:56

Golf1.6 said:
It needs to be a fast boot OS and not on dual boot, which is what I'm having difficulty with.

Isn't fastboot used by android?

Looking on wikipedia there is a link to instant-on which I think is possibly the thing but it's ROM based

What is the laptop?
It might be supported by coreboot (which is what I am using to boot linux on a chromebook)

wesley · 24 Oct 2014 at 10:30

i had instanton on my asus laptop. its rubbish.

pro - it boot up in 7 secs so not really instant! about 5 secs bios booting

con- cant do anything really. low resolution, laggy playing flash video ie youtube
terrible experience.

i prefer to wait for another 23 secs to win7/lubuntu