[mythtv-users] Quick-boot linux?

[Paul Bender]

Rich West wrote:
> Mark J. Small wrote:
>> On February 18, 2008, Ronald Frazier wrote:
>>   
>>>> How long does your distro take to boot into MythFrontend?
>>>>       
>>> About a 80-90 seconds. This is a debian lenny box doing a diskless boot.
>>>
>>>     
>>>> Can anyone recommend a cut-down distro that would boot in under 20 secs
>>>> straight into Myth...is that possible at the moment?
>>>>       
>>> One way is to use suspend to ram. That the approach I'm taking. Then
>>> you only have to tolerate a full reboot time if the power goes out.
>>>     
>> Do you have any issues with the NFS root + S2RAM combination?  Were there 
>> gotchas involved? I've always been a tad nervous about that one...
>>
>> I've been planning to try to get S2RAM working on my diskless frontend (a 700 
>> MHz Pentium III). I'd really like to have it on nearly instantly.  In that 
>> case, I would turn it off a lot more often, and save lotsa power.
>>
>> Now if only I could power it on/revive it with my remote, without investing 
>> even more money in this little hobby.
> 
> 
> Power on via the remote would be a wonderful thing!

I have this working on some of my diskless frontends. I use MiniMyth, 
which has S3 (suspend to RAM) support built in, including support for 
waking using the supported remotes. I use the MCE remote, which works fine.

However, S3 is rather temperamental. Whether or not it works appears to 
depend on everything, including hardware (including how it is connected 
together), software and BIOS.

My three front ends (two ASUS NVIDIA+AMD motherboards and one VIA EPIA 
motherboard) support S3. However, the VIA board will not wake using the 
remote's power button; I must use the computer's power button. Yet, 
others with essentially the same configuration (one only differing in 
that it has a dual core processor, and one only differing in that it has 
a VFD display) have problems with S3.

S3 is definitely a headache to get working. However, once you succeed, 
it is great.