Reduce boot/login time with readahead

I've compiled my own kernel starting from sickboy's .config file and I'm running my custom spinnie kernel now. That gave me a huge reduction in startup time from 1'44 to 1'11, but I was thinking it must be possible to easily reduce that a little bit more.

Something reminded me of readahead, so I googled and followed a guide to reduce login time and boot time. Last boot my AA1 was up and running after 1'05.

Empty your trash before starting.
First I followed step 1 of: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=565651
I suggest you open the file in gedit or other editor and remove all the unneeded files. I got a lot of lines concerning apt, and removed those. If you didn't empty your trash, you will see a lot of lines for every item in your trash, certainly remove those.

As step 2 I changed it a little bit: I made a seperate script with the code from part 3 and made that executable and placed it before my tweaks for the AA1 in /etc/rc.local
I use autologin, so if you don't it might be better to follow the guide itself

That was it for reducing login time. Reducing the boot time is a little bit easier:
When powering on the AA1 press 'esc' to get the grub menu, choose your favorite kernel and pres 'e'. Then choose the kernel line and press 'e' again. On that line after quiet splash or whatever you got there you add the word 'profile'. Now press enter and 'b' to boot. Now you can get a cup of coffee , but next time you boot, your system might be up a little bit faster...

For the ones curious about what my boot times are: I press 'esc' to get the grub menu and timer starts when pressing enter. My system does autologin and I use the netbook-release. The timer is stopped from the moment the netbook gui appears, most of the time I already have wifi connection at that moment.

 

I am also using sickboy's kernel and my boot times clock around 35-37 seconds until internet connection and desktop. Others have reported boot times around 20-25 seconds (with more ram than I) with the same kernel so your 1'05 seems a bit slow. Have you tried disabling/deleting bluetooth, print services and tracker etc. from start up to get a faster boot time?

 

my boot time with sickboys kernel and a ton of useless services removed is still over 1 minute from power button to full gnome on the 150 g model

 

Thanks for the heads up on that forum thread about the readahead for login. Timing your way it takes about 35 seconds to boot to a fully usable desktop. All I have done is follow the wiki, use sickboys kernel, and the readahead guide you posted. I do use metacity with compositing rather than compiz. I don't need all of compiz's flash, but I do need compositing for AWN.

 

hardran, which model one do you have? Are you using straight 8.10 with gnome? or the seperate UNR image?

 

8GB SSD, with a 16GB class 4 sdhc as my home partition, running regular old Ubuntu 8.10.

 

Hmmm. I wondering if the SDD models boot faster than the HDD?

 

rather than create a script to be linked from rc.local, could you just put part 3 in rc.local itself?