I recently purchased a vostro 1700 notebook from dell that I love. I am still tinkering with vista right now and want to keep it for a while, but I am currently dual booting with ubuntu.

I thought it might be a neat idea to replace ubuntu with a really quick booting linux distro (15 seconds or less?) that will allow me to surf the internet and access my google services but not be a really full featured distro like ubuntu or suse (i love suse).

The question is where to start? Which distro would be best at cutting this middle ground between supporting a lappie and wireless connectivity and still booting in 15 seconds or so? Puppy linux? Damn small?

Thanks in advance for your thoughts.

DSL has a boot time of 6 seconds.
BTW: installed, it doesn't have to be an minimal as the default.

The source distros can be super-fast... slackware or gentoo... but you have to remember to compile only that which you need.

You can probably get ubuntu's boot right down by switching services you don't need off. Ubuntu's "upstart" boot is supposed to be faster, in principle, than the usual sysV method. But I haven't experimented with this.

You're right, a very fast boot impresses people.

Certainly not Sabayon.

Maybe you should check out Yoper Linux. Its a full distro, build from scratch, optimized for i686 architecture. Its developers state that it is the fastest out-of-the-box distro available.

http://www.yoper.com/

Yoper is not the fastest boot - but when running, it's like a twitch game...

It all depends on what services you have starting at boot, the speed of your processor and your HD's speed. My debian/sidux system boots in under 30 seconds to kde.

Puppy, DSl are even faster.

And my system is no where near top of the line:
$ infobash -v3
Host/Kernel/OS "craigevil" running Linux 2.6.23.1-slh-smp-19 i686 [ sidux 2007-03.1 - Γαια - kde-full - (200708151444) ]
CPU Info AMD Duron 64 KB cache flags( sse ) clocked at [ 1800.144 MHz ]
Videocard nVidia NV34 [GeForce FX 5500] X.Org 1.4.0 [ 1280x1024 @50hz ]
Network cards Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] SiS900 PCI Fast Ethernet, at port: e400
Processes 91 | Uptime 47min | Memory 458.3/2027.3MB | HDD ATA WDC Size 80GB (60%used) | GLX Renderer GeForce FX 5500/AGP/SSE/3DNOW! | GLX Version 2.1.1 NVIDIA 100.14.19 | Client Shell | Infobash v2.67

I just dl'd xPUD and put it's main files on a my satahd that has debian on it. I put xPUD in a folder and wrote a little line for grub and voila boots in about 12 seconds. I was really impressed.

with zenwalk, if i install grub it can boot up in 45s

Fedora has improved quite a lot with their latest release.

If you edit menu.lst for DSL and change "nodma" to "dma=on"
you will see a difference also
Almost any distro that skips hw, etc detection will boot fastest yes?
also, dsl hd-install runs faster 'cause it doesn't run in ram as
opposed to frugal dsl, which does.

Calculate Linux 9.6 with the KDE window manager is loaded on my computer for 30 seconds, there is a lighter version of XFCE.
Distribution based on Gentoo.

Linupus lite boots seriously fast (easily less than 20 seconds) on my Acer Aspire One, and it's based on fedora so you can install extra packages with yum.

Edit to clarify: It seems that that what I have installed is referred to on that website as "Linpus 9.6", and that "Linpus lite" boots even more quickly, but I haven't tried it, so I don't know how flexible it is.

... though I don't have current hard data as to just how quickly.

Its my current favorite distro, partly for that reason.

http://www.tinycorelinux.com/

I second tinycore linux. Boot time is one of the fastest I've seen.

Wow - resurrected thread?

To compare performance you need a baseline - otherwise you end up comparing apples with pears. I would imagine anything that parallelizes the boot process will score high in terms of how much you can get up how fast - but if you need it then you have a lot to start. Similarly, a fast computer with a spare BIOS and few vendor intrusions can be expected to perform better.

I have a 25-30sec boot time with Ubuntu 10.04 (upstart boot) on an acer el1600 - same machine with DSL boots in 6-8 secs.
Power-on to login screen - so that includes POST and GRUB. OTOH: same Ubuntu on a PIII does not boot at all.

If you use LFS you can get a terminal-only boot-to-linux in only a few seconds ... extra time needed the more you want to work.
If you use core-boot it can be almost instant. Same with anything embedded.

I've seen a stripped-down W7 boot in 15-25secs - to a desktop ... but I have no idea what that means for comparison purposes. XP had fast apparent times too - but was still booting after the desktop was displayed.

OP has only posted once and vanished.