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Severi Salminen wrote:
> For the record: it takes only 11 seconds for my system to go from Grub
> menu to login (no X at that point). I use Gentoo.
I saw an interesting project where people were figuring out what steps you
could cut out of a Linux boot for known hardware (like a laptop) to get it
to boot all the way to logged in under X in less than five seconds. They
apparently got it working, too.
--
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
The NFL should go international. I'd pay to
see the Detroit Lions vs the Roman Catholics.
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>> I meant there are no Linux drivers for high-end hardware like expensive
>> graphics cards. Clearly there *are* Linux drivers for lots of other
>> things.
>
> No Linux drivers for what high-end expensive graphics cards, exactly?
I didn't say "no", I said "few". And I was making a generalisation.
> Most of those are now Nvidia or ATI IIRC, and there are Linux drivers
> that support the majority of those cards, even with 3D (though you often
> have to go to a proprietary kernel module for it). I use both the ATI
> and Nvidia drivers, so it's not exactly accurate to say that those cards
> don't work well with Linux.
Things have improved since 2006 then. ;-) I wasted a whole day trying to
get the nVidia drivers to work...
(Of course, a few months later I upgraded my graphics card, making my
Linux partition non-bootable. That was roughly when I decided to just
not bother fixing it.)
>> And by "a few" I meant more games and applications rather than drivers.
>
> There's quite a large selection of software. It may not be WoW, but it's
> out there.
Sure. And it'll probably continue to get larger over time. But right
now, it's still fairly modest by comparison.
--
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*
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Darren New wrote:
> I saw an interesting project where people were figuring out what steps
> you could cut out of a Linux boot for known hardware (like a laptop) to
> get it to boot all the way to logged in under X in less than five
> seconds. They apparently got it working, too.
And why shouldn't it boot in 5 seconds flat? Damnit! >_<
It seems that OpenSUSE likes to spend 20 minutes "layout out startup
files" or something. Very odd... But then, this is from the distro that
comes with a preconfigured AT job to rebuild the manpages once per day.
(Um... why?)
--
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*
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Orchid XP v8 wrote:
> And why shouldn't it boot in 5 seconds flat? Damnit! >_<
Some hardware just takes time to initialize and get polled. If you're going
to support (for example) USB devices, you're going to be slowed down by the
built-in time delays in the USB standard for initializing devices. I know a
guy who works on some motherboards they use on big disk-server thingies, and
it takes seven seconds just to get to the point where the firmware can run,
simply initializing all the various chips and letting them stablize. They
axed out starting the mail server, munging the keymaps at start-up, and so on.
I don't remember what it all was, but remember that hard drives, especially
notebook drives, aren't all that fast, especially when seeking.
Oh, there's the link. Easier to find than I expected.
http://lwn.net/Articles/299483/
Ah, they're booting off solid state. Hard drives take 10 seconds. They added
something not unlike MS's "readyboot", which keeps track of the order the
kernel pages disk pages into memory and uses that next time to read ahead.
I've noticed that even BIOS boot times, a while back, suddenly went way
down. A few years ago, a BIOS would take 30 or 40 seconds of fiddling around
to initialize. Then all of a sudden, every machine I saw would be loading
boot sectors within a seconds of power-up. Now my new machine is almost
that fast, except it has this annoying 10-second delay while it looks to see
if there's a DVD in the drive. Come to think of it, I can probably fix that
by telling it to look for the HD first...
Given that some laptop manufacturers are putting a dedicated button on the
machine that says "just boot enough to play a DVD", this would seem to be a
win. :-)
I do have to giggle at some of the reddit comments, tho.
http://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/742dw/making_linux_boot_in_less_than_five_seconds/
"I wonder if they could do the same magic with suspend and hibernate?"
"100% chance of waking up from suspend would be enough magic for me."
"Every CPU cycle is more coal burned at the plant."
"How much coal did it cost you to post that?"
"It's too shameful to answer."
--
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
The NFL should go international. I'd pay to
see the Detroit Lions vs the Roman Catholics.
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Darren New wrote:
> Given that some laptop manufacturers are putting a dedicated button on the
> machine that says "just boot enough to play a DVD", this would seem to be
> a win. :-)
My motherboard has a feature to play Audio CDs without booting an OS.
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On Thu, 11 Dec 2008 09:24:00 -0500, Tom Austin wrote:
> Jim Henderson wrote:
>> On Wed, 10 Dec 2008 16:27:30 -0500, Tom Austin wrote:
>>
>>> actually now that I've had more time to think about it, I was actually
>>> using initramfs which has settings to build and pack with the kernel
>>> image. Made it very simple indeed.
>>
>> Oh, yeah, that definitely would make it simple. :-)
>>
>> Jim
>
> What wasn't simple was figuring out that there was a problem with the
> the baud rate multiplier in my test setup. I still don't understand the
> origins of it, but with a patch I got the gibberish turned into actual
> text.
That sounds similar to a problem that I've run into building Rockbox on
my iPod with serial support (the interface on the bottom of the iPod is
serial, from what I read, and any dock that adds functionality to the
iPod uses that as its interface) - apparently the highly experimental
serial driver doesn't always detect the baud rate correctly, and that can
create interesting problems. I imagine the control channel looks very
much like gibberish. :-)
Jim
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On Wed, 10 Dec 2008 21:26:15 -0200, Nicolas Alvarez wrote:
> Jim Henderson wrote:
>> No Linux drivers for what high-end expensive graphics cards, exactly?
>
> No accelerated Linux drivers for almost any graphics card.
>
> ...I mean for DirectFB, not X :D
I don't know that that's a true statement, but I don't use DirectFB on my
systems. :-)
Jim
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On Thu, 11 Dec 2008 18:12:32 +0000, Orchid XP v8 wrote:
>>> I meant there are no Linux drivers for high-end hardware like
>>> expensive graphics cards. Clearly there *are* Linux drivers for lots
>>> of other things.
>>
>> No Linux drivers for what high-end expensive graphics cards, exactly?
>
> I didn't say "no", I said "few". And I was making a generalisation.
And a generalization that at least in the X world is not accurate. Just
because it's a generalization doesn't mean it's correct.
>> Most of those are now Nvidia or ATI IIRC, and there are Linux drivers
>> that support the majority of those cards, even with 3D (though you
>> often have to go to a proprietary kernel module for it). I use both
>> the ATI and Nvidia drivers, so it's not exactly accurate to say that
>> those cards don't work well with Linux.
>
> Things have improved since 2006 then. ;-) I wasted a whole day trying to
> get the nVidia drivers to work...
2006 is about 4 generations ago for openSUSE. Yeah, things have changed
since then. The ATI drivers used to be a royal pain the ass to install
and configure. Not anymore.
> (Of course, a few months later I upgraded my graphics card, making my
> Linux partition non-bootable. That was roughly when I decided to just
> not bother fixing it.)
Probably rebuilding the kernel? Otherwise, I can't see how a graphics
card change would affect the hard drive at all.
>>> And by "a few" I meant more games and applications rather than
>>> drivers.
>>
>> There's quite a large selection of software. It may not be WoW, but
>> it's out there.
>
> Sure. And it'll probably continue to get larger over time. But right
> now, it's still fairly modest by comparison.
You must be looking at different places than I. Go have a look at
sourceforge.net, freshmeat.net, and at the repository list for openSUSE
at the number of packages available. There's TONS of software for Linux.
Then add to that Windows apps that work with WINE (and that is growing
significantly every month). Now go find a Linux binary application that
runs on Windows without something like Cygwin.
Now tell me again that you have more choice on Windows than on Linux.
Jim
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Jim Henderson wrote:
> On Wed, 10 Dec 2008 21:26:15 -0200, Nicolas Alvarez wrote:
>
>> Jim Henderson wrote:
>>> No Linux drivers for what high-end expensive graphics cards, exactly?
>>
>> No accelerated Linux drivers for almost any graphics card.
>>
>> ...I mean for DirectFB, not X :D
>
> I don't know that that's a true statement, but I don't use DirectFB on my
> systems. :-)
In practice, I think DirectFB it's only used by embedded developers, and by
the people working on DirectFB itself :)
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>> Things have improved since 2006 then. ;-) I wasted a whole day trying to
>> get the nVidia drivers to work...
>
> 2006 is about 4 generations ago for openSUSE.
Actually is was (IIRC) Debian at the time, but whatever. ;-)
> Yeah, things have changed
> since then. The ATI drivers used to be a royal pain the ass to install
> and configure. Not anymore.
All I remember is that even after endless fiddling, I couldn't get 3D
acceleration to work. (Actually producing a picture didn't require any
special attention at all.)
>> (Of course, a few months later I upgraded my graphics card, making my
>> Linux partition non-bootable. That was roughly when I decided to just
>> not bother fixing it.)
>
> Probably rebuilding the kernel? Otherwise, I can't see how a graphics
> card change would affect the hard drive at all.
OK, to be completely clear: It booted, but X wouldn't run.
>> Sure. And it'll probably continue to get larger over time. But right
>> now, it's still fairly modest by comparison.
>
> You must be looking at different places than I. Go have a look at
> sourceforge.net, freshmeat.net, and at the repository list for openSUSE
> at the number of packages available. There's TONS of software for Linux.
Most of which is only marginally functional.
Don't get me wrong, there *is* some seriously quality software out
there. But there's also a lot of stuff that doesn't work very well.
(E.g., klogic. It does almost exactly what I want. But it doesn't *work*
properly. It randomly segfaults, and sometimes it GIVES YOU THE WRONG
ANSWER. It's also fiddly to use for no good reason.)
Anyway, how much *commercial* software (such as big-budget games) are
there for Linux?
> Then add to that Windows apps that work with WINE (and that is growing
> significantly every month).
It's news to me that *anything* works under WINE yet. (But then,
admittedly it's not something I follow closely. If I want to run Windows
software, I just run Windows...)
> Now tell me again that you have more choice on Windows than on Linux.
Most of the software *I* want runs only under Windows. Not all of it
(there are some notable exceptions), but most of it.
Of course, it depends what you're trying to do with your PC...
--
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*
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