Linux Distro Help

[crazyfool]

hey guys,
I am currently triple booting vista, xp and fedora 9. However i am now looking for a linux distro that can boot up within 20 seconds or so. I have heard about gentoo etc... but thats seems too complicated for me so what i want to know is, like vista is it possible to prevent services etc from running at startup on a linux system. Basically all i need this OS to do is play mp3's, nothing else, no internet or anything, i just need it to have a media player which can play my library of mp3s... which distro could you recommend for this which is fast booting or which system would be the easiest to alter what happens at boot to allow just for mp3 playback... any ideas would be appreciated

[Dapper Dan]

The fastest booting distro I've ever used is of course, CRUX. It's more difficult to install than most main line distros, (all command line) but what you have after installation is an extremely basic system from which to build what you want. No daemons or services will be running unless you turn them on. If you did that and got Internet going you could install moc (a command line player) via CRUX ports and listen to all your mp3's.

[squirm]

My one love speed distro has always been Slackware. I did try fluxbuntu on my quad core and it was unbelievably fast. I cant remember the boot times tho.

[techieMoe]

Just out of curiosity, why the emphasis on fast booting?

[i92guboj]

hey guys,
I am currently triple booting vista, xp and fedora 9. However i am now looking for a linux distro that can boot up within 20 seconds or so. I have heard about gentoo etc... but thats seems too complicated for me so what i want to know is, like vista is it possible to prevent services etc from running at startup on a linux system.

Startup time is mostly a very well defined thing.

It depends on:

1.- your hardware
2.- the firmware on your bios and the like
3.- the kernel
4.- the init system

1 is not changeable
2 is changeable depending on the hardware, and with some risk
3 is changeable by recompiling your kernel with only the strictly relevant options, but you are not going to gain nothing anyway, just a few miliseconds if you compile everything statically and you rip off unneeded stuff like unused port drivers.
4 is where you should be looking at

In that sense, all the distros are the same. Usually, most distros offer documents and howtos on how to configure their init system, how to turn on and off services and the like. Additionally, you could look into installing something like einit or initng, which are supposed to be faster and blah blah blah. There have been many attempts at that.

Basically all i need this OS to do is play mp3's, nothing else, no internet or anything, i just need it to have a media player which can play my library of mp3s... which distro could you recommend for this which is fast booting or which system would be the easiest to alter what happens at boot to allow just for mp3 playback... any ideas would be appreciated

If you are looking for something that's really customized, Gentoo would be a good choice, but it's not trivial to install. I guess that this might offer some interesting pre-made results for you:

linux media center distro - Google Search

I hope you can find something that suits you.