Maximum PC

Does anyone know what the best *nix distro is for instant on? I want to be able to plug in my flash drive with an OS on it and boot off it into a minimal desktop environment, like ASUS has on its motherboards. I just want Firefox, a printer driver for an HP Deskjet D1560, and maybe Thunderbird and Pidgin/Gaim. If It take more than 30 sec, it would be easier just to boot the whole system. Also, the system in question is an HP dv7t, which has HP Quickplay. However, it is of the generation where it boots into Windows and then launches the Quickplay Windows program. I have herd rumors that the computer still has the tiny flash chip that the Quickplay OS used to be loaded on to. If so, could I put the aforementioned OS on there? How would I do so? All help is greatly appreciated. Thanks!

Well, instant-on is hardly my area of expertise, but as a rule of thumb source-based distros are generally a bit faster when compared to Debian or Redhat based distros (.deb and .rpm, respectively).

I personally would use something like Slackware or Arch with the bare essentials. A kernel, required drivers, X server, and Firefox doesn't really need all that much space or power.

So would either of those boot in < 30 sec? If not, then they arn't what I am looking for.

With Arch sitting on a G1S (hard drive upgraded to 320GB 7200RPM), I get power button -> login screen in exactly 30 seconds (inexact timing). I could probably do more tweaking to get it to boot faster too.

If you're looking for a USB stick based distro, check out FaunOS (based on Arch)

In a sense, ANY Linux distro can be made to boot in under 30 seconds. In fact, there was a /. article on this a few weeks ago. http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?si ... 6&from=rss

Slax is my absolute favorite distro for that purpose.

I know this is bringing up an old thread, but if someone else finds this, I believe the best fast boot linux os is xPud, as recommended in the print edition of Maximumpc.

If a mod has a problem with bringing this up, I'm sorry. Please feel free to remove this post.