Intel Moblin V2 Alpha 2: It Boots Even Faster!

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Intel Moblin V2 Alpha 2: It Boots Even Faster!

Back in January Intel had pushed out its first alpha release for Moblin V2. This Intel-optimized Linux distribution targeting systems with Intel Atom hardware was quite unique and offered a number of advantages for being a netbook-oriented operating system. Particularly special about Intel Moblin V2 was its boot-time, which was extremely fast when using a Solid-State Drive. Intel has now put out a second alpha release for Moblin V2, which we are briefly exploring today.

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=13623

[Louise]

I think we have Vista to thank for Intel's strong interest and push for Linux.

Let's just hope that Windows 7 won't run on XP class hardware.

[puelocesar]

It's just a pity it doesn't run on my Eee 701

[RealNC]

Am I the only one to consider boot times useless? I can't even remember when I've shut down my laptop anymore. I just close the lid and it suspends.

Wasted effort IMO.

[jeffro-tull]

@RealNC:
yeah, you might be.

Not all of us have hardware that has perfect suspend/resume support. Like my Aspire One. Some distros suspend and don't wake up (openSUSE). Some suspend and wake fine, but have issues with attached devices such as the SD card slot(s) (such as Arch and I think Ubuntu 8.10, don't recall).

It might be fixed by now (or not), but my Thinkpad T60 had issues waking from suspend as well. In Windows XP and plenty of Linux distributions, the graphics chipset (using Catalyst/fglrx) wouldn't come back properly.

So, yeah, boot times are important. Would I rather see work on better suspend/resume support? Sure. But if that's not getting top billing, then I'm more than happy to see boot times get sliced.

[Kano]

@puelocesar

Did you try? It basically runs on much more systems than specified.

[puelocesar]

@RealNC:

Battery life doesn't lasts forever.. Suspend/Resume is just a workaround for the slow boot time problem, but not a solution. I would rather have fast/instant boot times then workarounds like suspend

And IMO that thing of letting computers ON all the time is a *HUGE* waste of energy. You people that do this have ever stopped to think on the energetic/environmental problems that this causes?

[puelocesar]

@puelocesar

Did you try? It basically runs on much more systems than specified.

Well.. they say it doesn't work because it's not an SSSE3 capable processor (Celeron M)

From the requirements page:

* CPU: Intel Atom or Intel(r) Core(tm) 2 CPU (support for SSSE3)
Note: Moblin will not work on non-SSSE3 CPUs

[Kano]

Well there are Celeron-M with SSE3, did you check?

grep -o sse3 /proc/cpuinfo

[RealNC]

@RealNC:

Battery life doesn't lasts forever.. Suspend/Resume is just a workaround for the slow boot time problem, but not a solution. I would rather have fast/instant boot times then workarounds like suspend

And IMO that thing of letting computers ON all the time is a *HUGE* waste of energy. You people that do this have ever stopped to think on the energetic/environmental problems that this causes?

No, because suspend to disk doesn't consume energy. It shuts down completely. It then resumes from the image saved on the swap partition.

People do this on Windows. It's too useful to live without, even if Windows has very fast boot times. Fast booting is a workaround for suspend bugs, NOT the other way around.