laptop as a terminal

Understand that the kernel boot is still going to take some time as it looks for installed hardware/peripherals/etc. That being said, the best way to avoid all avoidable overhead is to boot into single user mode since that won't start networking or other daemons.

Learn and understand the structure of the startup files in /etc/init.d and how they are selected as symlinks in /etc/rc?.d then you'll quickly see how to customize a runlevel that only provides the functionality that you need.

minicom shouldn't need any other backgrounded daemons running and should work fine from runlevel 1.

If all you want is a dumb terminal then use something running under DOS. You can get Freedos for free, dig out a suitable terminal program and use that. Probably a fraction of the boot time for Linux.

Hello,

as said before, if you don't need anything except serial console, you should boot to some DOS. It can't get faster.

If you want to use linux, make it easy, just for your purpose. Compile a linux kernel without anything you won't need (you only need serial support, console via graphics hardware, keyboard) and compile a minicom (or something else) statically. Then copy it to /sbin/init (you won't start other programs) and mount root read-only (cannot destroy your fs). Make sure you create appropriate devices etc. You could even use BusyBox to create a linux system as simple as possible.

But if you still need things like networking, framebuffers, shells, maybe even X, you're not done. Then I'd recommend to create a partition (5 Mb should be much too large) and put a simple DOS inside it. FreeDOS, as recommended, is a good idea. Or maybe you have some old DOS disks lying around (4 or 5 should be sufficient).

Regards, Sebastian

"Yan Seiner" schrieb im Newsbeitrag news: snipped-for-privacy@poseidon.seiner.lan...

I like it... I'll just hack up init to do what I need.... IIRC the busybox init code is pretty small.... So it shouldn't be difficult to launch minicom right off the bat and proceed with initialization in the background....

Try a distro that'll let you install as little as you want, like gentoo. Maybe a distro that is designed for booting off a floppy? Build a minimal kernel with just drivers for your hardware. Don't even bother with sound or networking. You should be able to get away without X; just use the console frame buffer. No services; put minicom into rc.local. It shouldn't take a whole minute.