A simple matter of…

Sometimes I watch DVDs lying in bed before going to sleep. However my laptop takes a while to boot (I stopped using suspend since it didn’t work with my Dell laptop for either mouse or screen – I really should recheck that).

So I decided to put on a really minimal install, preferably framebuffer based rather than X based (although KDrive might work nicely too). By just using an kernel and ini
tramfs (or older initrd) then it should boot nice and quickly.

I then found GeexBox which does what I want.

Well _almost_ – it’s designed to be booted off CD-ROM or network. You can install it onto a partition. So I’ve converted it into just a kernel and initrd. I then removed the network probing (which takes ages) and disk scanning (I only want to watch DVDs or TV), this shaved 10 seconds off the time.

The PC takes 6 seconds to get to grub, then 10 seconds from there to DVD playing. Total disk space is 7MB – 2MB for the kernel, 5MB for the initrd.

Not too shabby I’ll post more details once I’ve written them up nicely.