Speeding up Mint Boot up

Mint is a lean multitasking Atari OS that is loaded from disk. Following are some hints on making Mint boot up faster on your Atari.

1. Minimise number of loadable filesystems, drivers and interfaces

Minimise the number of filesystems, drivers and interface that Mint needs to load will lessen the amount of disk activity and amount of work to do. This will also reduce the amount of memory used by the OS, as non-essential stuffs are not loaded into memory.

2. Boot with 1 bit colour screen

As Mint writes alot of useful text on startup, making it easier to write on the screen will speed up writting time. if you have 4 bits colour screen, the Atari will need to work more than 4 times harder to write on the screen. Worst will be for 8 bits colours. So setting your screen to 1 bit colour (i.e. monochrome) on boot up will speed thing up.

3. Shorten the time Mint waits for key press to enter configuration

It's no brainer that reducing the amount of wait time in Mint will decrease the wait time for your OS to load !!

4. Write protect Xaaes.log file

When Xaaes startsup, not only does it writes on to the screen, it also writes into a log file. if this log file is long, due to many reboots, it will take some time for Xaaes to seek to the end of file where it inserts the new log. If you write protect the logfile, Xaaes will not be able to open the file for writting, where by the seeking to the end of file and insertions of new logs will be skipped. This quickens up the startup of Xaaes tremendously.

5. Stop Xaaes high colour images

Xaaes seems to do some sort of palette conversion for the widgets for displaying in high-color. This adds significant time to the boot up. To avoid this conversion, rename the IMG folder in the XAAES folder, so that Xaaes cannot find the images and thus skips the palette conversion.