Which OS is the fastest, which would boot super, and I dont need fancy OS features or anything. The reason. say I want to check a phone number i have in my mailbox asap, and i dont want to wait long for everything to load, which OS will boot super fast and will support wifi\

it could even be just a browser inside a OS

thanks

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...item=869&num=1Of course, only if you're building yourself a new box.

What kind of platform are you thinking of putting this on? A handheld device or a desktop or something else? This also depends on how much work you are willing to put into "supports wifi", and what wifi hardware you have. If you're talking about x86 and you don't mind porting a driver, I've heard good things about Minix (the new one, not the historical inspiration for Linux) in terms of boot time and speed. The DOS's actually boot pretty fast, so FreeDOS might not be bad, but I have no idea what kind of hardware support it offers or how hard it would be to port a driver.

But I suspect those aren't really what you want. I doubt you want to code your own wifi driver, and you say you don't need fancy features, but you do seem to want a graphical web browser. So for pre-existing wifi support, you're down to about 5 options.

Windows
OSX
Linux
BSD
Other Unices with varying hardware support

Of these, Windows will have the best wifi support and the slowest boot time. OSX is sort of a happy middle ground. It boots about as fast as most linux machines and has roughly the same hardware support. Linux is probably your best option. It has pretty wide hardware support, and it's boot process can be tweaked to go really fast. BSD will compete in boot time and many other categories, but it can't touch Linux in wifi hardware support. I can't comment on Solaris or other unices, as I've never used them, but each one has it's faithful following.

I think your best option is going to be Linux with a customized boot script. Perhaps if runlevel 4 is unused on your machine, commandeer it to be your 'quick browser' mode. The boot process could skip a number of steps, just access the web and run links2 in graphical mode via svgalib or the framebuffer.

I have a Vaio laptop, TXn25n. 1.3centro, 1.5gb ram, 80gb, already dual booting vista and ubuntu, but i want a third very lite os which will boot super fast

i found Machboot somewhere, which claims a 10 second boot from cd, is there a way to make the live cd install onto my laptop?

I am in the camp that believes electronics lasts longer if left on. That also solves your issue--but is maybe not the best answer in terms of the environment.

How about Arch with one of the light-weight GUIs?