TinyCore looks good, but...

[alanbcohen]

I have put rc5 on an old 32mb stick and have been able to boot my Asus 701.  But, it is much slower than the built in Xandros image.  I am looking for a fast booting OS that can go to a local browser in a shorter time than the delivered OS for the purpose of using a local wiki as my notebook, addressbook, calendar, and glucose log on a small portable device.  I guess I'm looking for a Splashtop similar environment so a netbook could be used instead of a PDA.  I'll be following this project's progress and hope what I'm looking for is also in the back of your minds as you continue development.

Thanks for the preview of a future.

[curaga]

Usb sticks are slow. If you put the kernel and initrd on your HD, you can shave the slow bootloader loading time away; it's not a fair comparison to have ~5 MB/s device compared to a 150 MB/s device afterall.

Thanks for the feedback though


Edit: a quick side note. Google points to the eeeuser forums, where they say a typical Xandros boot on an eee 700 or 900 takes ~20-28 secs from poweroff. While I believe we have no intent to specialize for any certain machine, I do think that when compared on a similar boot media, we boot faster
I have recorded 5.6s from right after initrd loaded to full desktop on my c2d.

[alanbcohen]

Thanks for the suggestion.  But since my eee701 doesn't have a HD (4gb SSD and a 8gb SD). 
The 5.6sec sound great; what did you do to speed up the process on your machine? 

My guess is the opportunity to speed up the startup is mostly in eliminating the need for hardware detection by tailoring the install to the hardware.

[curaga]

Nothing; that number is bare TC booting from usb (the big reason for not counting bootloader time, aka loading kernel and initrd to ram). If I did use static devices instead of dynamic ones, that could take about 0.5 secs off.
Edit to clarify: It did not have any internal changes, but I did have some cheatcodes: "nofstab nodhcp base norestore nolocal" atleast. There might have been some other bootcodes used too.

By HD I did mean SSD's too, because they use the same (faster) bus, ie sata or ide instead of usb. The internal SD card readers are usually usb connected, and they would so offer no speed advantage.

[wurstbrot]

are you looking for a fast small kernel? Is there really no way back to 2.4.xx ?!

[tobiaus]

i love 2.4 but if anything sells me on 2.6 it's xubuntu and tc. i would be very happy if there was a 2.4 project related to tc, but it would need all its own extensions, i think.

[curaga]

It's not possible to use a 2.4 kernel with TC; 2.6.0 is the minimum for glibc and so for all apps.

[pema]

I totally agree with alan, I have been looking for a splashtop for years but it seems like I have to do it myself. Wouldnt splashtops be a perfect niche for microlinuxes ? Linux was all about small effective system and Iam so disappoitned with the ubuntu, suse etc copying more and more bloat from microsoft.
Is it possible implementing the ppp and pppconf from dsl ? that tool was brilliant for kickstarting usb broadbandmodems.

[bigpcman]

Good topic. I'm interested in a cd only fast boot cloud computing environment. I like the idea of a safe virgin environment after a restart. Has anyone put together a tc iso that includes either firefox or Opera along with flash9? I would assume this could boot up in around 8 seconds.

[roberts]

Good topic. I'm interested in a cd only fast boot cloud computing environment. I like the idea of a safe virgin environment after a restart. Has anyone put together a tc iso that includes either firefox or Opera along with flash9? I would assume this could boot up in around 8 seconds.

Why force those large apps all into memory with a remaster. Having the choice of of extensions, and modes thereof is already done.

[bigpcman]

Maybe you're right, although if the browser is the only application that's going to be running it may not matter. To your point, yes it would be simpler to use extensions. I know I can run every thing  from a dual partition usb stick but is it possible to do the same thing using a single cd?

edit: I suppose it's possible to create a multi-session cd or dvd with one session being the tc iso image and another being the extension and personal settings storage area ( In my example this information can be permanent). I'm not sure how to set this up. I'm just guessing but I assume the last session would have to be the iso image. Then after the system boots up the first session could be mounted and the extensions automatically loaded or accessed. Does this sound right?

[tobiaus]

i think there are two points being made here. one is that for some very low tech people (none of which are necessarily members of the forum!) it might be nice to have a tc demo that has a browser and flash already in the iso. (naturally to have flash in the iso almost certainly violates some copyright, and it's not the sort of thing i would offer for download, but i do like beafanatix, which is an iso that includes flash 9 or compatible.)

but the other point is that there are a lot of things you don't need to open up and remix to get them working. you could make an iso that has the extensions included, or you could use multisession...

however, to get permanent this and that, i believe roberts has already created modes that allow you to do what you want, and without a need to remix anything but to include extensions. it's simply a matter (i believe) of putting things in the right place to be found on boot? not of reconfiguring tc.

and as for flash, i suppose you can include getflash without violating anything at all. people will still need to run sound on from the oss menu, and getflash from the menu.

[curaga]

There is no need for multisession. All drives don't support it well. The easiest way (on a Linux box of course is to extract the iso, then create a directory called tce in the new cd structure, put extensions there, and then create the iso & burn.

The wiki page on remastering includes the right commands for extracting and creating the iso.

[tobiaus]

There is no need for multisession. All drives don't support it well. The easiest way (on a Linux box of course is to extract the iso, then create a directory called tce in the new cd structure...

that or isomaster to do the same. it's (very) nice to know there are instructions for doing it without isomaster, but it's such a nice thing for people that really believe using a computer should be at least as intuitive as using isomaster. most people, not necessarily you or me all the time.