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How To Speed Up Linux Booting
An anonymous reader writes "A common complaint about Linux is the amount of time the operating system takes to start. Like Linux itself, there are plenty of options and lots of flexibility for boot-time optimization. From dependency-based solutions like initng to event-based solutions like upstart, there's an optimization solution that should fit your needs. Using the bootchart package, you can dig in further to understand where your system is spending its boot time to optimize even more."
I guess the point is that we *should* be switching our machines off whenever possible as opposed to leaving them running for no reason. The home user isn't going to be persuaded by Linux if he/she has to wait a long time to actually get a computer into a usable state*.
;)
To be fair, my Windows box boots pretty quick; I think the time between power on and desktop is somewhere in the region of 50 seconds. The method of loading the core services - desktop - additional services at least gives the impression of speed, even through the disk continues to thrash for another 45 seconds as applications load in the background.
* Jokes about Windows never being usable even after booting can be inserted here as required!
The world doesn't end just near your nose. You may have a laptop and you may be happy with "hibernating" it, but many of us need to power off PCs. An office PC I power on every day, my home's PC I power on and off when I get and leave home.
And it's your comment the one that is insulting. You insult lots of experienced Linux users who do care about their machines booting several times slower than an XP pc.
And why is that? Because Linux boots up with a slow and serialized process, in which the whole system (with hyperthreading, gigs of ram, dual core, etc.) sits idel waiting for a single stupid syslog daemon to start, or worse: waiting for a DHCP client to get an IP address!
Not really. Not even mozilla.org either. That would be about:blank.
I don't need to download a page every time I start my browser, render it and slow it down, then replace it immediately with another page I want to visit. That's another part of system optimisation, and it avoids unnecessary strain on slashdot/mozilla/other servers, too.