Subject:
Edupage, 25 March 1997
Date:
Tue, 25 Mar 1997 13:06:41 -0500
From:
Edupage Editors <educom@educom.unc.edu>
To:
"EDUCOM Edupage Mailing List" <edupage@elanor.oit.unc.edu>
************************************************************
Edupage, 25 March 1997. Edupage, a summary of news about information
technology, is provided three times a week as a service by Educom,
a Washington, D.C.-based consortium of leading colleges and universities
seeking to transform education through the use of information technology.
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...........
during the busy Christmas season. Some analysts believe that Microsoft's
own customers have urged the company to slow the pace of its technology
overhaul, as many corporations are only beginning now to switch over to
Windows 95. Memphis is expected to add a speedy boot-up technology called
"OnNow," as well as several changes aimed at making networked computers
easier to manage. (Wall Street Journal 24 Mar 97)
..........
The question I had, was related to a snippet in that article, regarding the
speedy boot-up technology that the next release of Windows was going to use.
I'm no computer programmer, but I always wondered if it was possible to get
linux up to speed (to a login prompt, that is) a bit faster than it is now.
I don't have any complaints because I have a PPro 200 mhz with SCSI II
hardware and drives (besides which, I don't really re-boot too often ;-),
but it would be kinda' neat to go from turning on the computer to a
graphical screen faster than any other OS. While the system bootup routines
ran, a simple login shell would become available (with the option of either
console use, or to start X immediately ala xdm, etc). The other virtual
screens would not become usable until the whole bootup sequence was
complete, but at least a person had use of some of the computers functions.
For those people who reboot to go from Linux to Windows 95, etc (again, I
don't really have to do this either, because I use the WABI application, and
can run Winword or Excel, etc from linux) this faster startup routine would
be nice.
Ah well, I'm no programmer, and I'm just musing (verbosely ;-) I guess I'll
just shutup and continue lurking...
-- Regardsmailto:john_timmers@mindlink.bc.ca Amateur Radio: VE7JBT