Fast starting Linux for dual boot?

[Disclaimer]Im not very familiar with Linux, I have Hardy virtualized on my computer at work but have only used it a few times.[/Disclaimer]

Im getting a Dell M1330 next week. Id like to dual boot it with a very lightweight, fast starting version of Linux. Something similar to Splashtop thats going into the new ASUS notebooks, but run off my SSD as opposed to mobo flash.

Are there any distros that meet my needs or can be customized to meet them? The only functionality I want in the OS is a web browser, music player, skype and chat. Video player and photo viewing would be nice but not necessary. Also, Id like the OS to start as quick as possible.

 

What exactly do you want Windows for? If it's not gaming, you can virtualize Windows in Linux, and then you don't have to worry about startup times.

 

I'm not familiar with Splashtop but the website says it will boot in 5 seconds. That's awful fast, and you might not find any Linux distro that would startup as quickly. However, if you wanted to play around with some lightweight distros you could take a look at some of the following and see if they work for you;

Fluxbuntu
Zenwalk
Elive
SAM Linux
Damn Small Linux
Puppy Linux

If you just wanted to find the lightest weight one, you could try each of their Live CDs, and see which one felt the snappiest. That way once you installed it, you would probably give yourself the best chance of loading a lightweight, fast distro, on your machine. I'm a Gentoo user myself, and if I was tempted, I would go the DIY route and simply install each part of the OS I wanted, specifically leaving out everything else, and then try to tune it to be as fast as it could. However, that would take the longest time to setup.

Good Luck.

 

I want Windows because that's what Im most familiar with. Sure, I can probably do 90% of what Ill need to do in Linux and virtualize the rest, but I really don't know Linux that well for it to be my main OS and also on my only computer. If I have problems in Windows I can usually troubleshoot them myself fairly quickly. I can't say the same for Linux. Eventually I may switch over but Im just not ready for it now.

I want Linux just as a quick on/off solution for me. Ill be doing some travelling in Europe for a few months and it would be great to stop somewhere, make a quick call with Skype, chat, or browse the web and be on the go again.

Thanks for the info, those distros you posted are definitely intriguing. If I can piece together the OS Im sure I could get it pretty close to what Im looking for. Im assuming Fluxbuntu would be the best to use support wise because its based off Ubuntu, right?

 

That's a good point, if I didn't game, it would be a no brainer for me, I'd just virtualize my copy of Vista and have a single boot system. I've been gaming less lately, I may do it anyway.

 

Fluxbuntu would be quite hard for a new user to figure out, but its incredibly lightweight.
DO you want this distro to look nice as well as being fast?

 

If possible id like to make it look similar to the Splashtop Screenshots, simple and intuitive. Im not sure how complicated that is to do in Linux though.

 

Well with the new version of VMware Workstation (and in VirtualBox right now, though it's an ugly hack) you can boot the physical Windows copy in a virtual machine. I'd say that's the best solution. Though I believe hardware profile support is necessary, and Vista doesn't have that.

 

Linux is really fascinating...Ive been reading up on this all day! Two things on my mind.

First, I got the source code for Splashtop...but I have no idea what to do with it! Im assuming it could be compiled into an ISO somehow and installed?

Besides that, I found this "Boot to ram" wiki page.

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/BootToRAM#head-a9b73ceef5dc7a1b3955a0af5074f317a5698ebb

This seems like it would be the ideal solution for me. I could take a LiveCd of a distro, customize it to what I need, put it on a 1 GB partition of my drive and boot it to my RAM. I wouldn't need to save anything so that would be a non issue. And, hopefully, if I could get the file system small enough I wouldn't have to squash it. Meaning the only load time would be reading it from the SSD, which has ~100mb/s read speeds, hopefully just a few seconds.

Is my train of thought here correct?

 

Of course, as long as you have the source you can do whatever you want with it. You can even make a custom SplashTop for yourself with programs you want. You might need coding expertise for that though.

 

Remember though, that the filesystem you choose in the install also makes a difference. For speed I recommend xfs, although this does require lilo. To run windows apps on your linux distro, wine isn't bad at all.
ps. if you want a distro that boots to ram, try out puppy linux

 

You mean installed onto a hard drive. An ISO is an image file meant to be burned to a CD or DVD. I would assume one could install Splashtop from source code, although installing an OS from source, even one as widely documented as Linux, which Splashtop is based on, would be a fairly complex process.

Again the process you linked to is a method to load Linux, in this case Ubuntu, into a RAM disk, and then run the entire OS from RAM. Which would give you the fastest possible OS speed, at the loss of stuff like being able to save stuff permanently, etc. However, the article states;

Even if you tackled the complexity of setting this kind of system up, the article mentions the benefits of this method as primarily desktop performance, power, noise, durability, the ability to abruptly poweroff and privacy, but fast boot is not one of them. This method means doing an initial mini-boot from disk, then copying everything to RAM, and then booting the OS from RAM. It certainly wouldn't be as fast a boot process as Splashtop.

At first I wondered if what you were after was something some folks developed for a Brazilian distro, Resulinux, which is called the Texas Flood Init System. There was a thread about it in our forum, and there's been some discussion over on the Puppy Linux forums about making a version of Puppy Linux with it. It would likely be a faster booting system than the Boot to RAM system you linked to. However, unless you want to install the Brazilian distro, Resulinux, which I'm not sure is English localized, and while you can get the Texas Flood init software as a standalone package easily enough, configuring it to boot another Linux distro is fairly complex, and probably not for beginners too.

You should really try out some of the LiveCDs of the distros I linked to and see if they don't offer enough of what you're looking for, before you complicate the issue further by trying to tweak a system with faster booting. If you are really after something that works just like Splashtop, in the end the best solution may be to simply wait until Asus makes Splashtop, or what they are rebranding as Express Gate, available on the upcoming laptop models M70T, M51Vr, M50V, F8Vr, F8Va.

Good Luck..

 

Hmm... a few thoughs:

1. Having the source code for Splashtop will allow regular Joe Users to do very little because the speed advantage of Spalshtop is dependent on having the proper hardware. I'm quoting from their FAQ:

http://www.splashtop.com/faq.php

Translation: To benefit from Splashtop as a user, you need to have a machine with a BIOS that already has Splashtop loaded onto it. I'm not saying that modders cannot burn their own BIOSes but the vast majority of users do not know how to do that. There might also be some hardware requirements that go beyond just having the right firmware loaded onto the BIOS. If that's the case, getting Splashtop onto a machine that was not designed for it is likely to be beyond the reach of modders.

The reason Splashtop is so fast to boot is that it does not load Linux from the HD but from the BIOS. To do that it needs a modified Linux kernel (and maybe other elements of the booting chain needed modifications). They've released that code, which is quite swell, but if it is run from a HD, you're back to square one: slow boot.

2. I'm wondering just how flexible that Splashtop OS thingy is really going to be. I almost always use applications which are not listed among those which Splashtop supports. Then where is the data associated with those applications stored? If I use Splashtop's Firefox and the Firefox of a full Ubuntu installation, do I have to manage two sets of plugings, two sets of bookmarks, two sets of preferences, etc? How secure is the data stored by Splashtop?

Somehow I think I'm going to stick to suspend to RAM and suspend to disk to reduce power consumption while at the same time keeping the flexibility of a full OS.

 

Thanks for the responses guys, very informative. Scratch the idea of using the Splashtop source.

I think Im going to go with a version of Puppy Linux, Macpup. It comes with a few programs that I want already. Plus I wanted some sort of dock app, as I think its very simple and intuitive. All Ill have to do is hide the menu bar, add a few apps and put them on the dock and turn off everything else I don't need. My laptop should be here Wednesday, so next weekend Ill probably begin tinkering around with it.

I still think I want to boot this to RAM though. Id like to minimize writing to the SSD to increase its lifetime, save battery power and Ill probably do all of my important work in Windows. Plus if I can get everything setup perfectly and boot to RAM ill never have to worry about nuking the files on the SSD.

Any thoughts?

 

I say go for it, and share your experience w/ us. Just don't forget to add the toram option at the linux boot screen so that it copies the data to your ram....

Lately, I've been been looking to have some kind of OS that could boot fast myself.... I installed this 120MB version of windows xp that i made w/ nlite, but that didn't work out too well for me (it seemed actually to boot even slower than normal windows). I also tried parallelizing linux startup processes once, and that worked well in fedora, but I want the bootup process to go even faster...

 

my linux boots in about 5 seconds. no fancy tricks. jsut use an init replacement like initng, or runit. and dont enable any services. hardcode your IP so you dont need to wait 3-5 seconds for the lease to verify, and use a SSD so theres no spinup time. and set your grub/lilo delay to 0

its not really that hard. you certainly dont need splashtop stuff

 

also gnome and kde take like 20 seconds to load all their crap into RAM. so it goes w/o saying, use something lightweight like dwm or openbox.

 

Or xfce for the fastest desktop envi so far.