Fastest frugal install?

spoovy · 05-25-2010, 12:28 PM

I use CentOS on my laptop. The only issue I have with it really is boot time (over 1min30secs).

Sometimes I just want to quickly boot up to do a web search or something so I was going to install puppy as a frugal install, hoping to get a fast booting simple system. I really don't want to mess about with my partitions so a frugal install makes sense. After problems with wireless though I have almost abandoned puppy. I thought I would ask you lot for alternatives.
So, has anyone got any other ideas for distros which would suit my needs?

Fast booting
Fast operating (RAM operation would be good)
Frugal installable

Its a Toshiba equium laptop, 3Gig RAM, intel 4965 wireless chip.

Cheers

Mr-Bisquit · 05-25-2010, 12:36 PM

You need to build RAM boot yourself. The debian forums have a howto on doing such.
Frugal depends on you. You can install the system and then create your own ramboot-frugal image to load.

Boot speed depends on CPU, startup services, etc

John VV · 05-25-2010, 01:58 PM

that is to long , even on a laptop
i boot into cent 5.5 on a 10 year old dell with, 1 gig of ram, in less time

what ( if any services ) have you turned off a boot ?
this is for fedora but will work for CentOS 5 also
http://www.mjmwired.net/resources/mjm-services-f11.html
turn off the ones not needed

spoovy · 05-25-2010, 04:14 PM

Thanks for the article, I turned off a couple more services after reading that - ones I had never been exactly sure what they did. I still timed my CentOS boot at 1:40 though, from grub to active desktop. It's not loading services that takes the time though, there are loooong pauses before and after that stage. It waits for 30seconds before even printing "Welcome to CentOS... "!

I have tried to solve similar problems before with other distros, and everyone on forums is always quick to agree that boot times are slow; but nobody ever has any solution other than to turn off services. I ran Mandriva 2010 - very nice distro - for a while, but it also booted in over a minute, while other people were talking about 25second boot times on lower spec hardware.

Who knows the cause, not me that's for sure. It's not really an issue though 99% of the time, hence my original post.

Cheers though anyway.

John VV · 05-25-2010, 04:56 PM

if you are up to it Arch boots very fast
i boot into Arch faster than Cent

but it is a very minimal startup

one thing you could try is to turn off rhgb in the kernel line of the grub.conf

Code:

kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.18-194.3.1.el5 ro root=LABEL=/ rhgb quiet 
---- to this ---
kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.18-194.3.1.el5 ro root=LABEL=/

this causes X11 to start -- then shut down -- then start up a second time -- then the login screen

turning it off will have x11 start only once

spoovy · 05-25-2010, 06:42 PM

Thanks i'll try that.

So from what you and Mr Bisquit are saying I should be able to do a frugal install of pretty much any distro right? I had only seen it before with puppy.

Arch would be perfect, i could set that up very minimally to boot and run very fast.

John VV · 05-25-2010, 07:08 PM

if you do go with arch . read and reread the install guide and "beginners guide"
and the arch wiki . Arch is not the easiest to install and get running, but it is well documented .

http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Main_Page

also for cent
have you looked into using xfce and xdm
instead of the default Gnome and GDM

spoovy · 05-26-2010, 04:05 AM

Thanks, yeah I have installed Arch before. I found it to be very fast and very simple (once installed I mean, not the installation itself!). Would suit me well if I could do a frugal install.

I wouldn't know how to do a frugal install though, assuming it is possible. I will have a google around.

I use KDE with CentOS - one of the main reasons I use CentOS is so I can still use KDE 3.5. I will look into switching from KDM to XDM though ta.

Cheers