I've been having a play around with a few different flavours of Linux and I find that that boot time isn't great. I know disabling the different tasks can speed things up, but are there any that are designed to boot fast out of the box? TIA
have you tried GenToo? It's a text based install, and not easy, but both I and friends have had very good luck with it.
Gentoo is supposedly the uber fast distro of choice, you need to do lots of boring compiley stuff. To be honest, best bet would be to get yourself into the bit-tech(#bit-tech) IRC chan on quakenet, theres a lot of 'nix knowledge floating about there.
I'll look into Gentoo and Slackware and perhaps pop onto IRC later (need to install mIRC again). Thanks for the quick replies
Just to add my 0.02p, I use Debian, and on my Thinkpad R40 (1.2G PM) booting is surpisingly fast: only a minute or so from power on. It has very few services running though, as I just don't need them there.
I second what Trigger said. If you turn off all the unnecessary crap at startup any distro would be rather fast.
I've not seen many differences between boot times with different distros (unless of course you cound SuSE which is just slow) - it's all about which services/processes you want to start at boot (for instance the AppleTalk daemon takes an age to start). I'm using Kubuntu atm which isn't the fastest thing to boot, but doesn't particularly bother me since I rarely reboot/turn off anyway.
You could also look into parallelizing when services start up. If you choose Gentoo, there is at least one thread about it over on their forums. Let me know if you go that route, and I'll see if I can find it.
Also don't take the equivalent time it takes to boot windows as a reference. Windows cheats slightly by drawing the desktop before starting most services, so that it looks like you've booted, even though you can't actually do anything. Anyway, I recommend Gentoo, because their forums are awesome, the documentation is immense, and Portage is the dog's proverbials. Sam