Flame wars over the best distros seem to be a favourite on Linux forums, but I've not yet come across a 'stop-watch' comparison. My question is:

Which distro would have me surfing the web the quickest from the moment I press the power button?

I ask because Fedora 4 is quite sluggish on my 1Ghz PIII - no doubt because I installed too many unnecessary apps trying out Linux for the first time! I'm considering a change to VectorLinux SOHO 5, VidaLinux VLOS 1.2 (out Aug 1st), Yoper 2.1, etc. which are apparently very quick and relatively easy to install. I think if I were to try a Gentoo stage 1 install at the moment I may do more harm than good. I'm not too bothered about the package manager.

Any thoughts? Has anyone timed their boot-up? (please feel free to boast!)

Thanks in advance.

I had the same problems with FC... I switched to slackware; works great and goes REALLY fast on my not-so-great PC.

thought: try gentoo stage 3 (aparently the install is a lot cleaner of a stage 3 than any other stage, due to files not being left around the place)

by the way: welcome to LQ

Why stage 1? there's stage 3. Gentoo is supposedly really fast, so is Slackware and any distro is, if you know how to configure it.

Slackware, Gentoo, and LFS are the fastest distos around. Vector is Slackware based and is easier to use because it has a nifty central configuration script that calls all of the other scripts slackware offers. I use Slackware cause Vector didn't give me the level of control I wanted.

Arch is pretty quick. Gentoo is okay in quickness of running but installing stuff is stupid unless you have a couple of computers to share the load with.

Hard to get much easier than Arch (www.archlinux.org)

The minimal install is 82Mb. If all you wanted to do was start X, a small window manager then use Firefox then you could probably get by with(been a while so I might be missing a step)

pacman -S hdparm (and turn DMA on your hard drive else chugga chugga)
pacman -S xorg
pacman -S fluxbox (damn best wm there is and extremely light-weight)
pacman -S mozilla-firefox
xorgconfig
startx

I highly recommend Arch for a workstation. Pacman is the damn best binary package manager I've seen yet. The abs source build system is not as good as Gentoo's emerge but it's good enough. Arch doesn't have a huge community like Debian or Gentoo but that's not such a bad thing

As for FC4, you can get it running as well as any distro if you take the time to tweak it. FC does a monolithic install and after you boot the first time you'll have tons of uneeded services running. Turn off what you don't need and also disable ipv6. Don't use that frickin gnome garbage either. Compile your own version of fluxbox and aterm/eterm and compile a custom kernel and you'll be screaming along nicely in X. I still use a custom RH8 setup I've had for many years tuned like that and it has been great for general workstation and development platform and for gaming(ut2004 runs like a dream).

For a server I'm 100% behind CentOS4 hence my username It's actually quite good for a workstation too. You won't be on the bleeding edge like with FC4 and Arch but it's something I know I can rely on since it's just a rebuild of RHEL4.

Good luck with whatever route you take.

Yes Arch was the fastest distro that i tried and its package manager is great

Instead of changing distro / whatnot, I suggest you to dump init and change to initng. It should cut down your boot up time by at least 70%.

The problem with linux takes a long time to boot is because init only start one service at a time, synchronous (I suppose due to stability and ease to debug concerns). Asynchronous bootup is much faster and used by Windows and now available in Linux through initng.

Of course you could just compile a custom kernel and only start services that you actually need. I used to use Slackware and Gentoo, I cant say their boot up time is much faster (if at all) than other custom distro ive tried (currently on ubuntu, gonna try suse later),

Thanks for the tip , i will definitely try it out