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jamesgoode

Posted: Fri Mar 28, 2008 7:44 am

Guest

Hi,

I've been using Debian and Ubuntu Linuxes for some years now, and they
all work well, with one exception; they all take forever to boot, and
with a laptop that I need to get out and use quickly quite often, this
isn't very suitable, so I'm even considering switching my laptop back
to Windoze XP.

Could anybody recommend to me a distro which boots quickly? I don't
mind if it doesn't have a package manager, as long as it has Gnome or
XFCE by default or easily installable, all the programs I need are
Openoffice, an image viewer, and an IDE (that is easy to install
anyways).

Many thanks,

--James Goode.

jamesgoode

Posted: Fri Mar 28, 2008 9:53 am

Guest

On Mar 28, 6:46 pm, Dances With Crows <danceswithcr...@usa.net> wrote:

Quote:

jamesgoode staggered into the Black Sun and said:

I've been using Debian and Ubuntu Linuxes for some years now, and they
all work well, with one exception; they all take forever to boot, and
with a laptop that I need to get out and use quickly quite often, this
isn't very suitable

Why are you rebooting your laptop? Suspend-to-RAM works well on a lot
of laptops, and resuming from suspend-to-RAM takes about 5 seconds. If
you don't know how to configure suspend-to-RAM, say something and post
the make and model# of your laptop. If you're paranoid about battery
life, suspend-to-disk is also available. Suspend-to-disk is generally
much more of a pain to set up, and it takes much longer to resume since
the kernel must read state from slow disk instead of fast RAM. But it's
available.

Could anybody recommend to me a distro which boots quickly?

Gentoo with baselayout2 will boot faster than anything, but your problem
is not boot speed. Your problem is rebooting when it's not necessary.
You should also use update-rc.d to turn off all the services you don't
need, particularly "hardware detection" and any MTA that isn't ssmtp.
(Most people do not need or want to run an MTA on a laptop.) Same deal
with apache, since apache takes 2-3 seconds to start, and you only need
a webserver on a laptop if you're doing web development on that laptop.

I don't mind if it doesn't have a package manager

? If a distro doesn't have a package manager, it's going to be insanely
difficult to maintain.

--
There is not enough coffee in the world.
--TimC in ASR
My blog and resume:http://crow202.dyndns.org:8080/wordpress/
Matt G|There is no Darkness in Eternity/But only Light too dim for us to see

Hi,

Thanks for your help - I'm using a Compaq Evo N410c, which I've heard
is a real pain when it comes to power management. I've tried to
suspend to ram and hibernate through the 'Quit' option in the menu,
however, the suspend option just locks the computer, and the hibernate
option won't let me use USB or PS/2 after restoring. I'm not sure if
this is what you mean by suspend-to-ram and suspend-to-disk, or if you
mean something like Tux-On-Ice? I'll look into it further.

Thanks for your help,

--James.

Dances With Crows

Posted: Fri Mar 28, 2008 1:46 pm

Guest

jamesgoode staggered into the Black Sun and said:

Quote:

I've been using Debian and Ubuntu Linuxes for some years now, and they
all work well, with one exception; they all take forever to boot, and
with a laptop that I need to get out and use quickly quite often, this
isn't very suitable

Why are you rebooting your laptop? Suspend-to-RAM works well on a lot
of laptops, and resuming from suspend-to-RAM takes about 5 seconds. If
you don't know how to configure suspend-to-RAM, say something and post
the make and model# of your laptop. If you're paranoid about battery
life, suspend-to-disk is also available. Suspend-to-disk is generally
much more of a pain to set up, and it takes much longer to resume since
the kernel must read state from slow disk instead of fast RAM. But it's
available.

Quote:

Could anybody recommend to me a distro which boots quickly?

Gentoo with baselayout2 will boot faster than anything, but your problem
is not boot speed. Your problem is rebooting when it's not necessary.
You should also use update-rc.d to turn off all the services you don't
need, particularly "hardware detection" and any MTA that isn't ssmtp.
(Most people do not need or want to run an MTA on a laptop.) Same deal
with apache, since apache takes 2-3 seconds to start, and you only need
a webserver on a laptop if you're doing web development on that laptop.

Quote:

I don't mind if it doesn't have a package manager

? If a distro doesn't have a package manager, it's going to be insanely
difficult to maintain.

--
There is not enough coffee in the world.
--TimC in ASR
My blog and resume: http://crow202.dyndns.org:8080/wordpress/
Matt G|There is no Darkness in Eternity/But only Light too dim for us to see

Dances With Crows

Posted: Fri Mar 28, 2008 3:31 pm

Guest

jamesgoode staggered into the Black Sun and said:

Quote:

On Mar 28, 6:46 pm, Dances With Crows <danceswithcr...@usa.net> wrote:
jamesgoode staggered into the Black Sun and said:
I've been using Debian and Ubuntu Linuxes for some years now, and
they all work well, with one exception; they all take forever to
boot, and with a laptop that I need to get out and use quickly
quite often, this isn't very suitable
Why are you rebooting your laptop? Suspend-to-RAM works well on a
lot of laptops, and resuming from suspend-to-RAM takes about 5
seconds. If you don't know how to configure suspend-to-RAM, say
something and post the make and model# of your laptop.
Thanks for your help - I'm using a Compaq Evo N410c, which I've heard
is a real pain when it comes to power management.

http://www.vjet.f2s.com/linux/compaq_evo_n410c/index.html says there's
No Problem. http://larve.net/people/hugo/2002/12/evo410 says that there
are problems, but that page refers to really ancient stuff like XFree
4.3, so it's less of a concern than you might think. What have you
tried? How has it failed? Which version of the kernel are you running?
Have you looked at http://tuxmobil.org/compaq.html and checked all the
pages for the 410c?

I personally had to tweak the scripts in /etc/acpi/ to get everything
working on my IBM T42p, as closing the lid generates an ACPI event of
type "button/lid" while opening it generates an event of type
"processor/processor".

Quote:

Could anybody recommend to me a distro which boots quickly?
Gentoo with baselayout2 will boot faster than anything, but your
problem is not boot speed. Your problem is rebooting when it's not
necessary.
I've tried to suspend to ram and hibernate through the 'Quit' option
in the menu,

*Which* menu? Remember, we aren't using the same WM/DE that you are.
GNOME has some weird HAL power manager thing. What should always work
to begin suspend-to-RAM is "echo 'mem' > /sys/power/state". Resuming
may or may not work automagically, depending on whether you're using
fglrx or radeon and whether you're using a framebuffer console.

Quote:

the suspend option just locks the computer, and the hibernate option
won't let me use USB or PS/2 after restoring. I'm not sure if this is
what you mean by suspend-to-ram and suspend-to-disk

"Hibernate" and "suspend" are less clear than S2RAM and S2disk. I have
heard less clueful people say "hibernate" when they meant S2RAM, for
example. Usually, doing S2disk involved the kernel freezing all
processes, the kernel writing a flag and all state to a swap partition,
then poweroff. Next poweron, the kernel should check the swap for that
flag, and if the flag is there, read all state from the partition. That
is essentially a reboot, and *should* set all hardware up properly. It
did when I tried it, but then the T42p is full of mostly-sane hardware.

Quote:

or if you mean something like Tux-On-Ice?

There are multiple implementations of S2disk out there. I tried 2
of them and found they both were a pain. Linus has complained about the
S2disk code and what a pain it was on the kernel developers' mailing
list before. Things are slowly improving, but you'll have to try it and
see what you get.

--
For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple,
neat, and wrong.
My blog and resume: http://crow202.dyndns.org:8080/wordpress/
Matt G|There is no Darkness in Eternity/But only Light too dim for us to see

Jerry Peters

Posted: Sat Mar 29, 2008 4:05 pm

Guest

Dances With Crows <danceswithcrows@usa.net> wrote:

Quote:

jamesgoode staggered into the Black Sun and said:
On Mar 28, 6:46 pm, Dances With Crows <danceswithcr...@usa.net> wrote:
jamesgoode staggered into the Black Sun and said:
I've been using Debian and Ubuntu Linuxes for some years now, and
they all work well, with one exception; they all take forever to
boot, and with a laptop that I need to get out and use quickly
quite often, this isn't very suitable
Why are you rebooting your laptop? Suspend-to-RAM works well on a
lot of laptops, and resuming from suspend-to-RAM takes about 5
seconds. If you don't know how to configure suspend-to-RAM, say
something and post the make and model# of your laptop.
Thanks for your help - I'm using a Compaq Evo N410c, which I've heard
is a real pain when it comes to power management.

http://www.vjet.f2s.com/linux/compaq_evo_n410c/index.html says there's
No Problem. http://larve.net/people/hugo/2002/12/evo410 says that there
are problems, but that page refers to really ancient stuff like XFree
4.3, so it's less of a concern than you might think. What have you
tried? How has it failed? Which version of the kernel are you running?
Have you looked at http://tuxmobil.org/compaq.html and checked all the
pages for the 410c?

I personally had to tweak the scripts in /etc/acpi/ to get everything
working on my IBM T42p, as closing the lid generates an ACPI event of
type "button/lid" while opening it generates an event of type
"processor/processor".

Could anybody recommend to me a distro which boots quickly?
Gentoo with baselayout2 will boot faster than anything, but your
problem is not boot speed. Your problem is rebooting when it's not
necessary.
I've tried to suspend to ram and hibernate through the 'Quit' option
in the menu,

*Which* menu? Remember, we aren't using the same WM/DE that you are.
GNOME has some weird HAL power manager thing. What should always work
to begin suspend-to-RAM is "echo 'mem' > /sys/power/state". Resuming
may or may not work automagically, depending on whether you're using
fglrx or radeon and whether you're using a framebuffer console.

the suspend option just locks the computer, and the hibernate option
won't let me use USB or PS/2 after restoring. I'm not sure if this is
what you mean by suspend-to-ram and suspend-to-disk

"Hibernate" and "suspend" are less clear than S2RAM and S2disk. I have
heard less clueful people say "hibernate" when they meant S2RAM, for
example. Usually, doing S2disk involved the kernel freezing all
processes, the kernel writing a flag and all state to a swap partition,
then poweroff. Next poweron, the kernel should check the swap for that
flag, and if the flag is there, read all state from the partition. That
is essentially a reboot, and *should* set all hardware up properly. It
did when I tried it, but then the T42p is full of mostly-sane hardware.

or if you mean something like Tux-On-Ice?

There are multiple implementations of S2disk out there. I tried 2
of them and found they both were a pain. Linus has complained about the
S2disk code and what a pain it was on the kernel developers' mailing
list before. Things are slowly improving, but you'll have to try it and
see what you get.

Also there's a nifty little program that's part of the suspend package

on sourceforge called "s2ram". s2ram handles saving and restoring the
video modes. It may work automatically for your laptop via its
builtin list, or you can specify options (determined by
experimentation).

Jerry

Jurgen Haan

Posted: Mon Mar 31, 2008 4:33 am

Guest

jamesgoode wrote:

Quote:

You can try using bootchart to map your bootprocesses.
Try stripping services that start during boot. (stuff like pcmcia,
bluetooth, etc). (sysv-rc-conf).
And try letting certain services start after your boot process is
completed (rc.local). Databases, Webserver, etc.

There's a possibility to have bootscripts start in a parallel fashion.
(/etc/init.d/rc) But beware, it may break dependencies (like HAL needing
DBUS, you can tweak this by playing with the S numbers in your RC dir.).

The most important thing to reduce boot times, is to understand what
happens during the boot process.

You can also do some general tuning, like for instance tune the EXT3
filesystem: data-writeback, noatime settings, etc. (warning:
data-writeback might dump you into a maintenance shell during bootup).

As for distro recommendation... Wel, if it's only speed you're concerned
about, and not so much user-friendliness, you can give slackware a try.

-R-

Stefan Patric

Posted: Mon Mar 31, 2008 10:11 pm

Guest

On Fri, 28 Mar 2008 10:44:51 -0700, jamesgoode wrote:

Quote:

Hi,

I've been using Debian and Ubuntu Linuxes for some years now, and they
all work well, with one exception; they all take forever to boot, and
with a laptop that I need to get out and use quickly quite often, this
isn't very suitable, so I'm even considering switching my laptop back to
Windoze XP.

Could anybody recommend to me a distro which boots quickly? I don't
mind if it doesn't have a package manager, as long as it has Gnome or
XFCE by default or easily installable, all the programs I need are
Openoffice, an image viewer, and an IDE (that is easy to install
anyways).

I'm running Debian Etch on a Thinkpad 240X (P3 500MHz, 192MB RAM), and it
boots to the login prompt in 47 seconds. There's nothing installed on
the system that doesn't absolutely have to be there. I did the Base
Install, first, rebooted, then used Aptitude to install exactly what else
was needed. I use XFCE.

Stef

Jurgen Haan

Posted: Tue Apr 01, 2008 4:50 am

Guest

jamesgoode wrote:

Quote:

I've been tweaking my Ubuntu Studio install yesterday. And it's
boot-time rivals that of a macbook pro. (Bios load and gnome login takes
a lot of time, but the overall boot process beats the mac.)

I'll take up gnome tuning another time.

Things that I've done:
- Reduced the amount of modules in my initramfs
- Disabled checking for a resume image in my initramfs (gains about 5
seconds, I never use hibernate anyway.)
- Removed checkfs from the boot process.
- Disabled a LOT of services during boot, and removed all kill scripts
for services that do not start. (All but essential services get started
now. I'll activate logging myself when I have crashing stuff, etc.)
- Disabled accesstimes on my EXT3
- Enabled Concurrent boot scripts (Messes up your bootmessages, but hey,
USPLASH is hiding that anyway.)
- Changed the order of services starting. (example: SSHD now gets
started after GDM is started).
- Reduced the number of TTY's to 2 instead of 6
- Removed the 3 sec grub time-out
- Removed a lot of stuff started in gnome-session
- Enabled autologin at gdm (skips drawing the login screen).
- Disabled some boottime HW checking (My hardware generally stays the
same every boot).
- Put the activation of DHCP enabled devices in rc.local instead of
risking a timeouteing (oo.. new word) dhclient/dhcpd during my valuable
boot time. (Sometimes I'm wired, sometimes I use Wifi, sometimes I'm
offline). (Warning, do not put your entire networking there, because
some services NEED a localhost).

If you're in a situation where you're waiting for over a minute for
booting to finish. Either disable or fix your usplash. (known issue).

-R-

Jurgen Haan

Posted: Tue Apr 01, 2008 4:51 am

Guest

And yes. The system is still as usable as before.

-R-

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