Ubuntu 9.04 boots in 7.83 seconds!

Recently I treated myself to a solid-state drive (SSD). That’s essentially a hard-drive made out of memory chips. I bought the Intel X25-E Extreme, which uses faster single-level cell (SLC) memory chips instead of slower multi-level cell (MLC) memory chips.

I wanted to put the drive through its paces, so I decided to see how fast I could boot Ubuntu and start Firefox. It turns out that Ubuntu 9.04, code-named Jaunty Jackalope, is just a few days away, and one of the features listed is “significantly improved boot performance.” Perfect! I installed Ubuntu 8.10 from a CD and then followed the incredibly easy instructions to upgrade to the beta of 9.04.

So how fast did Ubuntu 9.04 boot with a solid-state drive? Really freaking fast. Like, “I can’t believe it’s already done” fast. Well, here, watch for yourself:

Total boot time from pressing power to Firefox loaded was about 22.5 seconds, with about 5 seconds of BIOS display on a Thinkpad. Subtracting out the Thinkpad BIOS display time, that means that Ubuntu 9.04 booted into Firefox in about 17.5 seconds. I think I’m going to have a lot of fun with this hard drive. Oh, and Ubuntu 9.04 looks really interesting too. 🙂

For the folks that are curious, I changed the GRUB boot loader time out from three seconds to zero, enabled automatic login to my account, then I added Firefox to default list of startup services.

Added: I collected a couple boot charts by using bootchart. As Ryan said in a comment, I ran sudo apt-get install pybootchartgui bootchart , then rebooted, then collected the image in /var/log/bootchart . If I’m reading the images correctly, it’s claiming 8.67 seconds for one boot-up and 8.69 seconds for the other boot-up.

Added: Okay, I reinstalled Ubuntu 9.04 so I could use ext4 and it shaved almost a second off the boot time! Check out this image which shows a 7.83 second boot time. 🙂

80 Responses to Ubuntu 9.04 boots in 7.83 seconds! (Leave a comment)

  1. Note that Ubuntu 9.04 wasn’t all unicorns and rainbows, however; I ran into wireless and ethernet issues. After booting, NetworkManager kept prompting me for a password saying “enter password for default keyring to unlock.” The final answer for me was to rm $HOME/.gnome2/keyrings/{login,default}.keyring and then follow these instructions. But I only found that solution after trying a bunch of solutions. At one point I ended up at a gdm login window with an “authorization failed” pop-up blocking the login screen. Hitting enter just made the pop-up come back immediately and block the login page in an infinite loop. I finally had to mount the hard drive after booting from a live CD to fix things. Also, I would like to point out that to a normal/regular user, having Applications->Accessories->Passwords and Encryption Keys as well as System->Preferences->Encryption and Keyrings is somewhat confusing. Even after I got NetworkManager to connect to my wireless network automatically, it still look several seconds to kick in.

    The ethernet issues were even worse. I installed on a Thinkpad T60p, which evidently uses Intel’s PRO/1000 Gigabit ethernet. The eth0 interface never appeared. Instead, dmesg said “The NVM Checksum Is Not Valid.” Evidently this was a whole big thing. People seem to think it’s a solved issue, even though it bit me. I never got the ethernet working, despite working through a wiki page devoted to the issue.

  2. Dave (original)

    Matt, why the need for saving seconds on boot-up?

  3. It’s tales like this that keep a lot of people from trying or switching to Linux. I mean the whole “it just works” thing is important to people, even those who might have the technical ability to hunt down and apply fixes, but really don’t want to.

    It’s basically been my understanding (from experience) that you can have new hardware or Linux, but not both.

  4. I never advise people to install newly released versions of Linux distributions.

    Don’t be anxious. Patience will pay and the wait will be worth a lot of headaches that you will not have if you wait.

    It is wise to wait at least 1 month before using a new version because many bugs only get fixed with real world usage.

    I do not use Ubuntu. I use OpenSuSE, but it is probably the same. After 1 month, when you install a new version it automatically downloads and install updates that fix practically all proeminent bugs.

    This wait period is equivalent to waiting for a service pack on Windows or whatever it is called on Macs, except that you will not get a service pack on Windows before waiting many months or years.

    Agility is just one aspect that Open Source world beats the proprietary world.

  5. hi, matt

    you could try install bootchart
    this will log and produce a png in /var/log/bootchart/
    you could see the boot time of linux

    and you could post it on web

    ^^

  6. I’d be much more interested in a boot chart.

    sudo apt-get install pybootchartgui bootchart
    reboot

    There will be a png image in /var/log/bootchart with total boot time and other data. (remove both those packages when you’re done so they don’t fill up the disk with bootcharts)

    I’ve had Jaunty boot from a hard drive in 19.8 seconds, so I’m a little suspicious.

  7. Matt, it should be noted that 9.04 has not been launched yet into mass distro. It’s still in beta and going through last legs of testing.

  8. I generally agree with Manuel Lemos here: installing beta, bleeding-edge distros is a troubleshooting session waiting to happen. Even more so if you decide to upgrade instead of a fresh install.
    That being said, I am writing this on Ubuntu 9.04 too, and I must acknowledge; it is the fastest, leanest, stablest and most polished Ubuntu distro that I’ve ever used (and I’ve been a fan since 6.06). Two pluses to the Ubuntu devs and to Canonical for supporting its development. Too bad it’s not an LTS release, because I’d definately keep this one for a couple of years.

  9. @Greg Bulmash:

    Matt forgot to say that Ubuntu 9.04 is currently a Beta.

  10. SSDs are cool, if only they came with more capacity. Life with only 32 / 64 gigs seems to be a bit limited 😉

  11. I noticed in your video you are using the filesystem EXT3. If you were to use the newest filesystem EXT4 which is available on the ubuntu 9.04 beta ISO it will boot even faster. The newest linux filesystem EXT4 has about a 20-30% faster boot. You might want to try it and see what your test results are. cool video

  12. ivanusto, I’ll see what I can do.

    Stefano F. (tacone) makes a good point. I definitely am playing around on the bleeding edge. And I use wireless 99% of the time, so not having ethernet isn’t a problem the vast majority of the time. I only wanted ethernet to see how quickly I could have a network connection, frankly. If I hadn’t stepped off the beaten path chasing auto-login and faster boots, Jaunty Jackalope would have been an extremely smooth release for me so far.

  13. I use Ubuntu as my full time OS. As Manuel said, I would never advise using a “day one” installation of any Linux distro for a production machine, especially if you aren’t dual-booting XP. I recommend a 3-month wait on a production installation of 32 bit Ubuntu, and 6 months on the 64 bit installs( due to a smaller installed base, it takes longer for users to report issues).

    In addition, I am leery of distro upgrades through Synaptic, as this has bitten me more than once. I would recommend backing up your files, and then doing a clean install directly from a disk image.

    That being said, I am an Ubuntu evangelist, and look forward to installing Jaunty, after the bugs are worked through.

  14. Thanks IVANUSTO, bootchart shows my old hdd boots in 18.94 seconds.
    view chart at my blog http://clintbrothers.blogspot.com/2009/04/ubuntu-904-beta-boots-in-1894-seconds.html

  15. I have a Dell Mini 9 with Ubuntu 8.04 that boots to wireless connection in 62-65 seconds. Those with the faster SSH report 35 second boots.

  16. graphicartist2k5

    i think any operating system that is booted from a solid state drive will perform quicker. for instance, the version of xp pro that i’m using right now boots pretty damn fast on my dell latitude c600 laptop that only has 256 mb of ram and a pentium 3 processor that runs at 800 mhz. i haven’t timed how fast it actually takes to boot up, but i know for a fact that this laptop performs WAY better since installing xp on it over windows 2000. when i first got it, it was slower than molasses in the middle of january, and it didn’t perform NEAR as good as it does now. the version of xp i’m running is a slimmed-down version that only loads the necessary components that xp needs, so i know exactly what processes i don’t need running in the background, and i’ve got all kinds of tweaks in place to keep xp from being a resource hog. windows isn’t really a bad os, it’s just that most people don’t want to take the time to do anything to make their windows-based computers run smoother. alot of it is really just common sense stuff, too, such as running disc cleanup, defragging the hard drive and registry, cleaning the registry, and so on. it’s not that hard to get a computer running windows xp to perform better than it did when you first bought it. of course, the laptop i have now was given to me, and as i’ve stated already, it was in SAD shape!

  17. Great video Matt! Would like to see a future blog post from you to help us windows cronies understand the differences between a classic OS such as XP and Ubuntu.

  18. Ryan and all, I updated the post with bootchart images. I booted twice and the times were 8.67 seconds and 8.69 seconds.

  19. bootchart only count time from “grub menu” to “entering desktop”

    i install ubuntu 9.04 on my pc with ssd (i chosse files system EXT4)
    it count only 9.x secs ^^

  20. I can probably beat that with Arch if I tried even halfway hard.

    I do wanna ddress the “bugs after new releases” thing.

    Go to a rolling release distribution. Like Arch.

    No seriously. Because the devs aren’t going to be hard pressed for some sort of new version of the distribution, all new packages get a “when they’re ready” treatment. I have yet to encounter ANY problems whatsoever with updates once they’re out of bleeping [testing].

    Of course, there’s also the whole “next release of X distribution when it’s done” model a la Debian Stable. The problem is you’ll get stuck waiting for completely stable and ready packages to reach you because of a few odd packages that might not even have any impact on your system.

    I do not really like the “every six months no matter what” model of Ubuntu. Means that once they actually integrate their new features and get packages updated they’re in a terrible rush to beat the worst bugs. This means that packages are actually put right into the upgrade before they are ready. It also means that you won’t get things like the latest kernel very often.

    In Arch you get packages when their ready and you won’t be at the mercy of othe rpackages you won’t even install for the new versions of something. They even dropped the Catalyst driver back into the AUR because they didn’t want to wait for ATI/AMD to get their ship together and update the driver before releasing Xorg 1.6.

    And it WAS a bit of a wait. I wanted the latest kernel, which took a while to go from [testing] to [core]. And Xorg 1.6 took a reaaaally long time to get from [testing] to [extra]. They’re that thorough about catching bugs and making sure the stuff just works.

    Oh the advantages of a rolling release.

    After a while I got so sick of the bugs in Ubuntu that I switched cold turkey to Arch. I was impressed at how much BETTER the whole thing ran. And of course I didn’t have to put up with Pulse Audio breaking my sound anymore.

  21. Faster boot times is great and SSD are definetely the future of computer storage. However, do not get so excited yet and do not use SSD for critical usages for a long time, because the current generation still has a lot to evolve, not only in terms of size, cost, and especially lifetime of memory cells that are limited to a few tens of thousands of write cycles. This means that you will get bad memory cells of SSD sooner than you will get bad clusters of on current hard drives.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_drive#Disadvantages

  22. Matt why bother with Wifi when linux has problems with that area – just get a router that can run DDWRT and use that as a bridge to your AP/ADSL/Cable Router.

    And i thought the point of Linux was to be turned on and left running.

  23. Dude – that’s a sweet boot time and I can’t wait to get Jaunty installed on my laptop. How about boot up race at SMX Advanced in June? See you there.

  24. Nobody Important

    @ Maurice:

    Linux is actually fairly decent in Wi-Fi. The only problem is a very small percentage of manufacturers like Broadcom who refuse to give drivers to Linux. If you have a supported chip, Linux in Wi-Fi is effortless; this will apply for the large majority of chips, and most people won’t have a problem.

    It’s just those other drivers that have problems. And then when something doesn’t work, the line is usually, “Linux didn’t work with my Wi-Fi, Linux sucks.”

    Your anger is directed at the wrong people. “Broadcom doesn’t put out Linux drives; Broadcom sucks!”

    More and more companies are putting out drivers for Linux. It’s only a matter of time, I suppose.

  25. If only you used Fedora 11 Beta with the new Plymouth and all this that you’ve done! What is with everyone and Ubuntu?

  26. You didn’t show how fast the original version 8 was and then show 9.
    I’ll bet it was already super fast.

    My Linux on an Acer laptop boots up very quickly without a ss drive.

    When will wifi be predictable in linux?? Took me a week to get mine working and never connects at full speed – takes a few tries to connect to get the full connect speed.

  27. I have installed Jaunty on an HP TX2 tablet but the hardware is a bit exotic so I dont get to use all the funny touch features that vista and 7 enable.

    It runs pretty fast though.

    Also installed it on a Samsung NC10 … but I dont have an SSD at the moment.

    Matt : we cant wait for a version of this video with chrome for linux starting at a blazing speed 😉

  28. 7 seconds is still awfully slow to boot. Back in the day when I got an upgrade for my Amiga to go from 1M to 2M, I was able to load the OS into recoverable-RAM. Rebooting into a GUI took all of about 2 or 3 seconds. Ubuntu has always been slow to boot for me. I’ve tried various tricks to speed it up to no avail. I do look forward to solid state drives, though. Compared to waiting a minute or two, 7 seconds isn’t so bad.

    Sincerely,
    -daniel

  29. Quite a long time ago, I had a Celeron 333 with 128MB of RAM which booted in 14s with BeOS (time from the boot loader prompt to the fully responsive GUI).
    I think that’s it a little sad that it takes SSDs which cost several hundred of dollars to replicate the same feature with Linux or Windows with computers much more powerfull..
    There is no alternative choice unfortunately: BeOS is dead and Haiku isn’t ready yet.
    I suppose that I should be happy that now we have the SSD possibility, still having to wait so many years and spending hundreds of dollars just to go back to the same state..

  30. Installing sreadahead in place of readahead should give a nice speedup on SSDs.
    It’s packaged for Jaunty, give it a try!

  31. @afewtips

    from my experience (and others seem to report similar numbers) jaunty boots about 33% faster than intrepid; 20s down from 30s in my case.

  32. Is the computer any faster now?

    I’ve collected some comments on my blog from people say, in short, “Sure it boots faster but what about actually using it”.
    http://www.peterbe.com/plog/sandisk-ssd-vs-hdd

    I have a T60p and I’m curious how you find it to actually work with. Admittedly, booting is only 0.1% of my day-to-day time spent with the laptop.

  33. If you do some simple tweaks like killing unnecessary start-up apps and also use Ext4, you could shave at least another 4 seconds off. I had a clean 18.x second boot, and got it down to 12.x (in bootchart). But otherwise, this is quite impressive.
    As for all the bugs you people are talking about, well, truth is, their pretty much non-existent. I have been happily running 9.04 since the 4th alpha and the only time I had problems is when I tried to re-compile the kernel.

  34. Does this drive get fragmented too, like the X25-M based ones do?

    You might also be interested in this LWN article “LPC: Booting Linux in five seconds” from a while back: http://lwn.net/Articles/299483/

  35. I just tried it with my OCZ vertex 60G and got 9 seconds with a sustained 136MB/s. This is on a dell latitude E6500 2.8Ghz with 4GB of ram.

  36. Hi Matt, just one thing – had to correct you pronunciation of Ubuntu 🙂

    In South Africa, origin of the word (along with some other African countries), we pronounce it Ooboontoo, oo as in too.

  37. Dave (original)

    Added: Okay, I reinstalled Ubuntu 9.04 so I could use ext4 and it shaved almost a second off the boot time! Check out this image which shows a 7.83 second boot time.

    WOW! Nearly a whole second saved each day. What are you going to do with all this extra time?

  38. I went back to Hardy Heron after using Ibex a bit. I like its more established feel (i.e. try applying themes from Gnome-look.org on newer vs. older Ubuntu versions). Yeah, get excited about new releases. But stay with a more established version and you’ll thank me.

  39. Intel X25-E Extreme plays pretty well on Ubuntu… plus your knowledge that speed-up the process.

    Thanks for sharing that tweaks.

  40. What you doing with an iphone Matt??

    Should you not have a G1 or HTC Dream 😉 ?

  41. People who question the usefulness of fast boot times apparently don’t travel with laptops much. 🙂

    It’s not a big deal for my workstation at the office, which I maybe reboot once every couple of weeks or so (usually because of a stupid Windoze or Virus checker update), but when you are in situations where you may want to quickly show a presentation in a cab ride, or look up an email with an address that you forgot to write down, suddenly those seconds add up and seem like forever.

    Plus, it’s fun for some of us to optimize things. Hardware, office systems, boot up speeds, website rankings… 😉

    Ian

  42. Thanks for this video Matt. I’ve been dual-booting Intrepid and Jaunty on my ThinkPad T42 for a few weeks and I can confirm that Jaunty is significantly faster when booting. I also find it visibly faster whenever it needs to access the hard disk, especially when using the ext4 file system. It is also much quicker at acquiring a wireless connection.

    Your article also confirms that replacing my hard disk with an SSD like the Intel one is a worthwhile improvement and is supported by Ubuntu so I will definitely do that 🙂

    For those who wonder why improved boot time is important, bear in mind that at boot time your computer will load and initialise a lot of stuff so whatever you improve in that area will very likely improve general OS performance as well, which can give a new lease of life to older hardware: my 4 year old laptop running Jaunty feels snappier than a lot of brand new Windows XP/Vista laptops I’ve seen. Improved boot times also means improved wake up from hibernate, which is very useful when travelling with a laptop.

    As for hardware support, Jaunty is still in Beta (well, Release Candidate since yesterday IIRC) and no OS is perfect. For instance, Ubuntu handles my webcam and 3G modem better than XP. What I like with Ubuntu though (and Linux in general) is that it is easy to ask a question in the forums or file a bug and follow its progress. If you don’t know how to do that, there’s a good howto here: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/ReportingBugs

  43. Kubuntu Jaunty boottime record is 7.77 seconds here on a PQI SSD. It’s an average boottime of 8 seconds, sometimes a bit higher, sometimes a bit lower.
    What helped 2 seconds was to force initramfs to only include the modules I really needed to boot, the initrd in /boot decreased from 8M to 2.5M and the boottime was consistantly reduced by 2 seconds. Also I removed the overcautious “sync”” from the udev hdparm script.

  44. Wow that is so very fast! I really like the video illustrating the load time speed…some times a picture (or video) is worth a 1,000 words! :o)

  45. Matt,

    Did you know that there’s been a rash of legitimate messages from Blogger telling folks that their blogs *may* be spam and will be shut down if they don’t go through a process, the link for which doesn’t work?

    http://groups.google.co.ls/group/blogger-help-troubleshoot/browse_thread/thread/bc26cd01662b540f?fwc=1

    Not sure if this is in your area, but a friend who is a journalist for one of the top international newspapers wrote me because he got one of the warnings for his blog, which is essentially a collection of his editorials on his own website. I suppose Google or Blogger may think it’s evil because most of them also appear in his newspaper, but to delete the blog without giving him an opportunity to explain seems a bit extreme.

    Maybe the explanation is that Google/Blogger has identified a glitch and for that reason has turned off the destination of the link while they figure itout, but if that’s the case, a follow-up e-mail to the people who received would save the innocent ones some sleep.

    Morris

  46. Dave (original)

    People who question the usefulness of fast boot times apparently don’t travel with laptops much.

    I prefer faster performance AFTER boot-up :). If I want fast boot times, I’ll put my laptop to sleep and not shut it down.

  47. Dave (original)

    Morris, Internet 101. NEVER click a link that you have even the slightest doubt about.

  48. Hi Matt,

    also note that the Thinkpad T61’s and below don’t run at full SATA 3Gbps speeds and are limited to the 1.5Gbps speed. See this thread http://forums.lenovo.com/lnv/board/message?board.id=T_Series_Thinkpads&thread.id=31689 this could be influencing the boot time as well. Thinkpads T400,500 and above are not affected by this limitation.

  49. Matt –

    That’s a great SSD choice, only today I added that to my list of components for my next PC build. (And I typically do a lot of research before choosing components).

  50. Dave (original),

    Internet 102. Look at the HTML and see where the link points.

    Morris

  51. Dave (original)

    Morris,

    Common sense.

  52. Dave (original)

    Morris, if they deleted all spammy/noisy Blogs, that would mean 90% of Blogs are to be deleted. I sure hope so, but somehow I doubt it.

    IMO, Google created a monster the day they started offering free disposable sites to anyone with an email address. Seems to me like one department of Google is *encouraging* spam, while another is *fighting* spam. Happens a lot in BIG companies, the left hand is fighting the right and they never even realize it.

  53. Just installed Jauny RC on a 2.5 year old Dell Inspiron 6400 (Core Duo 1.83GHz) on an EXT4 partition. Bootchart gives me a boot time of 14.3 seconds – nice! I’ve had no problems with the distro so far, all hardware detected and working from the get-go. I’m quite impressed.

  54. Morris,

    Dave never reads anything. He just comes up with a stupid conclusion based on “common sense” that only he has based on assumptions that only he could possibly make and we’re all supposed to accept it as universal truth and placate his gigantic ego and lack of anything even remotely resembling intelligent thought in the process.

    Don’t ever expect him to change…or get it…or even shut up unless someone shuts him up. He’d much rather ruin a blog or a forum with his insane blathering about nothing that no one ever wants to hear than actually contribute something useful…and unfortunately, this is about the only thing he’s really good at.

    Odd question, though (and it’s going to sound like second-guessing, but it’s not intended to): why didn’t/doesn’t your journalist buddy register a dotcom and put the content up on it? If he’s doing it just as a storehouse and not as a for-profit venture, this would be one of the few arguments for a WordPress or other CMS. Or am I missing something here (besides the $20 a year required for domain and half-decent hosting for something relatively small)?

  55. “with about 5 seconds of BIOS display on a Thinkpad”

    Something is wrong here. These BIOS startup times are the same as if it was 1991, while computers got very, very powerful.

    Can anybody convince manufacturers to drop those slow 16-bit AMI & Phoenix stuff? :/

  56. Matt – hope you’re not running automatic log-ins normally 😉

    You should mention this to the systems guys – 22 seconds has got to be short enough that you could power-down machines during troughs and wake-on-lan when there’s a peak (I’m obviously thinking of front-end servers here, not map-reduce / database clusters).

    I spent a lot of time optimising my boot time for Intrepid on a Aspire One – got it down to about 30 seconds IIRC.

    I don’t know how much playing you did, but there’s normally a whole load of stuff you can remove as the machines start to load up, and it might also be worth telling the kernel to profile itself and try to optimise it’s order (I’ve forgotten the kernel flag for it)

    Oh, and I’m really not sure if readahead will actually help on an SSD (could be wrong) – it can add significant overhead, and the main reason it improves time is because of traditional seek-speed.

    You might also find this link interesting (although far too much of it involves patching your kernel, which isn’t something I’d even consider on a Debian derivative)

    http://www.debian-administration.org/articles/620

  57. Hello,
    I have a suggestion for the desktop search tool. I know it is not your department but I thought you can forward it to them.

    Add an option to the right click dropdown menu (windows) to search inside a specific folder. I think it is extremely useful for the case for example when you are looking for a piece of code in all the files of a specific folder and you don’t want to have the results from other folders. All you would have to do is browse to that folder, right click and click on “Search with Google Desktop”.

  58. What if the SSD is not used on this demo, will the new version of Ubuntu still boot the same speed or it doesn’t matter at all? I will try this new version and make my own post later when the official distro is release on public.

  59. Tarek, that’s possible to do, at least on Xubuntu 8.10, by getting it to invoke Catfish. You’d probably have to adapt this for Ubuntu or Kubuntu, if it’s even doable in those–but in Xubuntu here’s how it works.

    Open Thunar (click Places, File System). Click Edit, Configure custom actions. Add one, give it a name (e.g., “Search”), select an icon, and on the Command line, enter “/usr/bin/catfish –path=%F”

    It works great for me. The only functionality really missing is the ability to search for files containing your search criteria.

  60. Multi-worded Adam,

    My friend does have his own website, he just uses Blogger as the tool to write to it. Apparently Blogger is monitoring activity, rather than looking at blogspot blogs, and his legitimate use of Blogger hit some filter issue. I don’t recall whether or not he has a feed turned on, Blogger hosts some versions of those. While Blogger may dissable his access to the interface, I can’t imagine they would be dumb enough to actually delete files from people’s private domains, which would get them sued for sure.

    Either that or the whole thing is one of those pointless, elaborate scams that do no harm other than worrying people. In any case, I thought it was something Matt might be interested in.

    Morris

  61. 15 seconds with xp sp3 that I use now in my PC..
    not bad for Windows..

    But I still like my laptop with Ubuntu….

  62. Dave (original)

    Dave never reads anything. He just comes up with a stupid conclusion based on “common sense” that only he has based on assumptions that only he could possibly make and we’re all supposed to accept it as universal truth and placate his gigantic ego and lack of anything even remotely resembling intelligent thought in the process.

    Don’t ever expect him to change…or get it…or even shut up unless someone shuts him up. He’d much rather ruin a blog or a forum with his insane blathering about nothing that no one ever wants to hear than actually contribute something useful…and unfortunately, this is about the only thing he’s really good at.

    Do the words “Hypocritial Fool” have any meaning to you?

  63. I’m running Ubuntu on an old Compaq PC I found in a skip.

    It’s rock steady and fast to boot. I seldom re-boot because it just runs and runs for days on end.

    Now I just need to get a 2nd and 3rd monitor like posh folks have….

  64. @Yaro,
    Have you ever tried Debian? It sounds like it solves all your biggest problems without leaving the deb-based family of Linux distros. Arch is a lot for some people to take in, and Debian is a little easier to transition to for someone coming from Ubuntu.

    @Dave,
    It made my day to see you come back and post in self-defense. Keep up the killer posts, I’m a new subscriber after today.

  65. Dave (Original)

    Thank you, Jesse. MWA has a massive chip on his shoulder and has made a fool of himself almost daily for Years.

  66. Hi!
    I wonder how quicker it would be if you squashfsize the /usr partition on the intalled system…

    Would you try to squash so we mlay haven a 5 seconds boot time!

  67. I stumbled this interesting article related to the post –

    http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-boot.html

  68. nice thread,

    to Dave: I read the following about sreadahead:
    “sreadahead requires a kernel patch included in the Ubuntu kernel, and
    (currently) only works on ext3, allthough it is possible to develop
    support other filesystems.”
    so be carefull

  69. Jeez!
    That’s insane!
    I wish my computer booted in 20 seconds from power-up!
    *jealous*

  70. anybody!
    i just upgraded ubunto 8.10 to 9.04 after dowloaded from the internet and installed in my pc my comp does not responding anymore it just give me a no signal input on my screen. now i can not even boot up my pc. what went wrong? it was working fine with ubunto 8.10 os. pls help!

  71. If there was Computer Olympics and I was the gold medal contender in the Boot-up Sprint event, I am sure every second would have mattered. Other than that and, perhaps, situations were your life depends on your computer’s ability to boot in under 10 seconds (such as cases when I need to transport from the bridge of my starship before the warp core breach), I do not understand the obsession with quick boot time. I’d rather my system boots properly, starts services in the correct order, doesn’t try to connect to NTP, NFS, or NIS before the network is started, check the logs, check the filesystems, etc. And if this take a whole minute, oh well, I guess I will just have to learn to live with it. I’d rather spend my time following some good advise on how to make my system faster where it actually matters.

  72. Thomas Horsten

    Actually it’s the “automatic login” that causes the keyring issues. Normally the keyring gets unlocked at the same time you log in since it is encrypted with your password. When you have automatic login enabled, it can’t obtain the password and that’s why it prompts you for the keyring password. The keyring contains encrypted versions of your network passwords, that’s why the network manager needs to unlock it before it can connect to wireless.

    In fact Macs have/had a similar issue 🙂

    But as you said it should be fixed because it’s something ordinary users don’t understand.. Overall Ubuntu is very user friendly though, and there are not many things like these.

  73. Actually keyring problem is super easy to fix. All you have to do is go into the network manager prefs, edit the connection, and there is a tick box for allow all users to use this connection and a tick box for always authorize. Tick those off, hit save and no more keyring popup.

  74. Just installed crunchbang 9.04 on eeepc701 4g 512mb ram and it booted in 25 seconds..

  75. i can wait 10 seconds to boot…if it goes well in rest and Linux generally works very well

    nice article

  76. The 9.04 on my thinkpad t42 got the same speed, it was equipped with a mtron mobi 3500 ssd. The full install took 8 minutes, this is amazing fast.

  77. Hey Matt,

    I recently purchased an SSD and looking to put ubuntu 9.04. Are you using ext4 with journaling? Any performance tips? I was reading that you should not use swap space and to use noatime mount option.

    Vijay

  78. Matt:

    Interesting experiment and very interesting. At $383 at NewEgg it’s probably worth it as well. I just blew my wadd on a 15″ MacBook PRO so as Austin Powers says “I’m spent..”

    RM

  79. Charles McBride
    Originally From Houston & New Caney, TX
    It is really cool how fast Ubuntu boots up when it is installed on a solid state hard drive.
    My desktop is running Ubuntu 10.04 LTS – the Lucid Lynx on an asus with 8 or 9 GB of ram and around 2.6 cpu no solid state hard drive and mine is fast, as well. Now you have me woundering how fast mine would be if it did have a solid state hard drive.

  80. Is it just fast on boot, or is it also fast when working?
    regards
    Ola

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