5-Second Boot Time, Coming to a Netbook Near You?

There’s nothing worse than turning on the netbook you purchased for it’s speedy access to the web and finding that you’re temporarily immobilized by a 2-minute boot time. That’s like buying a jet ski with a hand crank.

We’ve had our own problems (and solutions) for netbooks equipped with time-sucking startup processes, so we can appreciate Liliputing’s discovery of a report detailing an enviable 5-second boot time on two SSD-packing Asus EEE PCs, one running Fedora and another with a version of Moblin.

The solution was created by two Linux developers who figured the answer to the Great Boot is “not about booting faster; it’s about booting in 5 seconds” They began by trimming wasted processes and streamlining others to funnel the overall time to a sharp goal.

The developers trimmed 40 seconds off Fedora by cutting programs like “sendmail” for turning on mailservers and “setroubleshootd”, a security check for Security Enhanced Linux. They also created a small patch that allowed important boot tasks to chug along while more minor processes are conducted simultaneously.

It’s smart programming that looks good on the tested Linux systems, but the developers can’t replicate the results in a netbook with a hard disk drive. Plus the presence of Splashtop/Expressgate and the slow uptake of netbooks pre-installed with Linux means there’s no telling whether or not the solution will come to mini-notebooks on the shelves, or if it will be effective for a beefier OS like Windows XP. Still, it’s reassuring to know there’s a faster path to your desktop out there.

Head over to Liliputing for more on what this quick boot could mean for end-users.