Tech of the day: FaunOS

I'm in the mood of playing with another Linux distro (see my previous post about Arch Linux) The motivation this time is to improve boot time on my various PC. I am in search of a distro that I could put on a USB flash drive and boot from there faster than booting from the HDD. Because of my good experience with Arch, I picked the Arch-based FaunOS.

The first challenge is to write the FaunOS image (btw, the official download link doesn't work. Use this mirror instead) to my Flash drive. The instructions given was to use dd (a Linux/Unix util.) I do have numerous *nix environment to choose from and I picked Cygwin. The documentation is a bit hard to find but eventually I figured out (by trial and error) Cygwin sees my USB flash drive as /dev/sdb (FYI, I have a HDD with a single partition on that PC and I've unplugged other USB drives)

After I dd the image to the drive, it now contains 2 partitions (a 5Mb FAT show up as sdb1 in FaunOS and a 1Gb boot partition sdb2) I don't want the rest of the space go wasted. So I fire up GParted in FaunOS and create a new FAT32 partition on space left. However, Windows only maps the first partition it could use on a flash drive to a letter drive, which is the tiny 5Mb one in this case. The solution is simple: remove that 5Mb partition using GParted again. Then the big partition became usable in Windows!

So, will FaunOS end my search of my perfect USB bootable linux distro? I'm afraid not. Here are things I don't like:
1) The boot time (from turning it on 'til I have a usable Desktop) is around 1.5 min, compared to 3.5 for XP. It's definitely a improvement but I think I could still do better if I build from the scratch (and use JWM instead of KDE)
2) Even those I choose to "Save" my session before shutdown but it does not remember my Wifi setting after re-boot so that adds another 30 seconds to the boot time
3) Audio does not work out-of-the-box.
4) FaunOS is an orphaned project.

My next step will be trying out larch, a utility for building "Live" Arch Linux. I'll be rolling my own, so to speak.

[Correction] Audio does work. I just need to open the mixer and unmute PCM.