Startup Time (Was: Re: What do you like best about Ubuntu?)

[Benjamin Roe]

> Have you timed this? Because it would be very encouraging... I timed the
> startup times (Grub to loaded desktop with auto login) of FC2, Ubuntu

On my laptop (P3-500,192Mb) from grub menu to gdm starting is 1 minute
15 seconds, about 5 more seconds to get into xfce using auto-login.
Loading GNOME would add another 30+ seconds to that, so I don't use it.

That's about the same as Mandrake 10 (~1 minute,IIRC) and SuSE 9.1 (~1
minute 30 seconds). Arch was much faster, down at around 30ish seconds;
buggy as hell, of course, but it was quite fast. I'd say my threshold
for start up being "effectively instantaneous" would be around 30
seconds. Debian Sarge was about halfway between - 45-50seconds, IIRC. 

The reason Arch was so fast is that it did virtually nothing at boot: it
seemed to go uncompress kernel, load modules, start udev and run GDM.

All timings with no unnecessary services running (no syslog,postfix,cups
etc), and everything apart from the Ubuntu boot time is from my hazy
memory. It's not a major issue, it's just a "would be nice if anyone has
time to do it" thing.

Ben