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Comment by digispaghetti | Hacker News Reader

On my Acer Aspire One (1.6Ghz Atom, 1Gb ram) with a 2Mb/s USB stick I counted about 16 seconds to boot from selection, overall about 30 seconds with my BIOS boot.

Couldn't get Wifi to connect, and a lot of missing features.

Very interesting though, could be perfect for quick kisok-style applications as well as a quick boot loader - looks like the plan allowing other OS's to be booted into from it.

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is there a place where one has a list of the most popular wireless and sound cards ? Maybe the developers can use that as a starting point.

It did seem to detect the device - the problem is when I clicked my SSID and put in my password, I'd click connect but it would just sit there doing nothing.

10 seconds (or 16?) doesn't seem that great - XP boots that fast for me. I didn't watch the video though, and most of my boot speed is due to my Intel SSD.

If this boots from a CD or a rotating HD in 10 seconds, then they could have an "instant-on" netbook. Instant-on netbooks and laptops will win over the end user. This is a step towards turning the computer into an appliance.

On that same machine?

Booting from a USB or CD typically means the OS needs to adapt to new hardware, uncompress the disk image and so forth each time it's run. The start up time of the Ubuntu LiveCD is considerably greater than a HD install of Ubuntu, for instance. So a 10 second boot time for a OS on a USB stick is fairly impressive.

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