Fastest Install: Our Bootable CD is the fastest install in the business by a long long way. The fastest recorded Bootable CD full install to date - from system power up - was just under 2 minutes. That's power up (15 seconds), CD startup (40 seconds), and full new install (60 seconds). That was on a 650 MHz ATA 100 system with a 7200RPM IDE drive and a 56 times CD-ROM. Not even a fast computer by today's standards. The slowest full install was just under 5 minutes on a system with an external USB bootable CD.
Most Computers: The largest completely Bootable CD network we have seen to date has more than 140 computers. It was done by one network administrator using a single Bootable CD in diskless mode and took less than 4 hours total installation and configuration time (less than 2 minutes per computer). It was part of a training setup.
Smallest Computer: One of our researchers is experimenting with a Bootable CD version for an iPAQ palmtop computer. We hope to have this in distribution early in 2002. We have a Libretto 50CT running our Bootable CD as well - 32Meg RAM, 640Meg Hard disk - looks good - works great.
Most Users per Box: One current setup has more than 60 users who can simultaneously log into one Bootable CD system for shell access. It is running off of a single bootable CD. It must be pretty crowded in there...
Most bytes on a 180 Meg CD: One of our distributions compresses almost 500 Megabytes of content onto a single 180 Megabyte bootable CD. Only cars get higher compression ratios.
Most CDs burned for one update: The record is a bit fuzzy here, but our current belief is that the most CDs burned to get from one running distribution to the next running minor upgrade was about 40. It included a hardware upgrade (the CD drive went bad), a speed problem (the writer was CD writing too fast for the CDs we had), too many changes for a minor upgrade (the new initial RAM disk was too big to boot, some rc.d files were changed, and the builder software was modified), and the ever popular miscommunication (two competent technical people had a minor miscommunication about a part of the directory tree).
Fewest CDs burned for a substantial new distribution: The Simulator distribution took only 12 CDs to get right and involved the creation of an additional server, additional web content, modification of lisp programs, and changes to the system builder software.
Most Downloads: When the free 50Meg distribution was released, there were 12,000 downloads in 8 hours.
Fastest Bootup: One of our developers just got a new computer, and he goes from the LILO prompt to up and running in 10 seconds. On average, the computers we test take between 30 and 45 seconds from power up to up and running (with floppy add-ons).
Have a Record? Let us know and we will add your story to those of our other users.