[ivwshane]

I'm curious to know just how quick most distros boot up. Most distros I run are from live cds or startup with a lot of services (like my firewall box). MS has done a good job of getting you to your desktop quickly and I want to compare it to popular linux distros.

[tex]

my arch box takes about 25 seconds right now, but it isn't tweaked at all. I got my buddy's down to < 10 seconds by specifying drivers, etc. Mine does a hwd driver auto-detect. Oh, and thats actually just to login. If you want to get to the "desktop" you have to login and run 'startx' =p

If you really want to do a fast boot time, you can get them down fast as hell, using all the different tweaks out, and stuff like linux bios. This grad student at school had his set to load up a full blown KDE in about 5 seconds (it was a beast of a machine, but still. damn)

If you want to speed up your boot up, look at what some of the guys are doing with carputers

[ivwshane]

We are talking about booting up (login screen) into gui's right?

[tex]

oh? like from gdm (or whatever one you're using?)

I was talking from pressing the power button. I'd define logging in -> desktop as "log in time"

Hell if I know on that, the guys I know either login or login at a terminal (like me) so xorg startup time factors into that (I wonder if I can precache X ... bwahaha)

[Electric_Head]

When do you consider it done booting up? Login prompt or after login and gui loaded with all startup scripts complete.

From power button to login prompt on my laptop I'd say is about 25-30 seconds. I still have to do a hardware check to get my damn dell wireless card working. I'm too lazy to fix it. I also have it scan and connect to any preferred networks before login. My desktop takes 10ish, but I have all my hardware modules compiled into the kernel.

To load the gui, maybe 5-10 more seconds depending on the gui.

Gentoo on my desktop and Arch on the laptop. On the laptop, Windows XP is a little faster than linux in its current state.

[c6comp]

Mildly Tweaked Ubuntu =25 seconds from power button to login screen
Login Screen to Desktop= ~4 seconds

[ivwshane]

Thats the info I was looking for.
So linux, pretty much anyway you configure it (with a gui desktop) will take longer than windows.

Do you guys know if thats something the linux community is working on?

[Electric_Head]

Originally Posted by ivwshane

So linux, pretty much anyway you configure it (with a gui desktop) will take longer than windows.

Ummm, no, if I wasn't lazy and configured my wireless card into my kernel or rc.conf file, I wouldn't need the hardware scan. It can also be configured to boot directly into gui, thus bringing the power button -> loaded gui/idle desktop to around 20 seconds.

Using suspend-to-ram tricks it can be taken down to around 3-5 seconds...

From what I gather, any OS can be setup to boot very quickly, just depends on the setup and different tricks that can be implemented in the given scenario.

EDIT: My desktop takes about 15seconds to be at an idle gui desktop. Faster than windows, but my windows boot isn't tweaked really, I only use it for guildwars.

[Torx]

man last time i used linux and had everything installed i like boot time sucked ass

[hans5849]

i havent put the effort into my laptop yet.

[tex]

They're working on stuff, I think the sys V scripts are faster right now, and a ton of distributions have been moving to ram disk. You can get really fast bootup times for not much effort (figure 15 seconds if your PC is compatible enough), but a lot of it is stuff that isnt going to be installed with ubuntu and its ilk anytime soon