I need to program the arduino with no bootloader to accelerate the starting time.
I have the AVR MKII programmer and I tried to do what they recommend there:
According to this post:
you have to make this chance on the preferences.txt file
Change: upload.using from bootloader to the identifier of one of the programmers in hardware/programmers.txt (e.g. avrispmkii).
But when I look at the file it doesn't say upload.using anywhere
You have read the instructions incorrectly. The file you want to change is preferences.txt and it is not in the hardware directory (what's in the hardware directory is programmers.txt and boards.txt). Your preferences.txt file is in:
/Users//Library/Arduino/preferences.txt (Mac)
c:\Documents and Settings<USERNAME>\Application Data\Arduino\preferences.txt (Windows)
~/.arduino/preferences.txt (Linux)
That is where you will find the upload.using entry.
I have Rel. 10 on one machine and the upload.using tag is not in my () preferances.txt either. (upload.verbose, upload.erase, upload.verify are).
I even deleted it and let the IDE recreate it.
However, when I look at my preferances.txt on a Rel. 11 machine, it is there. So perhaps it's a matter of using Rel. 11 ? I'm not sure, because the hacking/programmer post likely predates Rel.11.
I think (but I'm not sure) the upload.using option is only available on 0011 IDE version. Because with 0010 it isn't possible to upload sketches without the bootloader.
Change: upload.using from bootloader to the identifier of one of the programmers in hardware/programmers.txt (e.g. avrispmkii).
Apparently I was the one who was reading incorrectly. For some reason I interpreted this line as your saying that you were trying to make the change to hardware/programmers.txt. I'm glad to hear you have things working now. On top of having no start-up delay, you also now have an additional 2k of program space.