On Wed, 9 Jul 2003, Colin Hards wrote:
As to low productivity, this may be psychological as much as real. I get the impression that everything happens faster on my Win2000 system (Athlon 1.2GH, 392MB) box than the Xandros (Athlon 2.1GHz, 256MB) box - Win2000 loads in 70% of the time of Xandros despite the slower older system.
I too had very slow boot-up under Linux, until recently. Two likely explanations are:
Your machine is loading lots of stuff at boot time that you don't really need. Take a look at the messages that come up while it boots. Are you ever going to use that news server/mail transport agent/third firewall?
Your machine is checking your file-systems rather more thoroughly than (IMO) is necessary at each boot; the equivalent of Windows running scandisk every time it starts. This is only likely if you have non-Linux partitions such as vfat, since Linux' native ext2 file-system handler has a clever mechanism for counting how many times a file-system's been mounted, and only doing the thorough check about once every 20 boots.
Both of these can be fixed by fairly simple configuration tweaks, with the minor irritant that the fix for the first one will vary from distro to distro (I have a reasonably good idea how to do it for Debian, but not necessarily for Xandros.) The second involves an edit of the /etc/fstab file, to tell the boot process not to check the vfat file systems. I don't remember exactly what you have to edit, but "man fstab" will probably tell you.
If anyone _is_ giving a talk on "Linux from start to stop," these would probably be good things to include in it.
Since fstab and the boot scripts are pretty critical things, I'd suggest having a reasonably recent system backup before fiddling with either.