i was over at a mandrake poll (the which mandrake is the most stable) and i told them 9.0 had the fastest boot time for me, around 20 second, WITH all the services i dont need off and the ones i needed on. 20 second from lilo to iceWM.

so what was your fastest boot time? and what distro were you using? i was running Mandrake 9.0 at the time.

Have a look at this thread. You will see answers to your question.

yes, but its eaier to see a poll. and, he was just talking about general boot time (to his console). im here to ask about useability. i dont care about your boot time, you can get it down to 5 seconds, sure, but is your system useable? useable to the point where you can use the gimp, mozilla, or emacs. basically to do your every day tasks. not just a console.

his looks like a generalized, plain old "what's the fastest boot time". mines just a plain old what was your fastest boot time, no hardcore tweaking to get these speeds as well.

I never really thought boot time was important unless it was taking a ridiculous amount of time (2-3 minutes, for example). Anyway, out of curiosity I just timed it. SuSE 9.0, 1.8ghz P4:

Grub to console = 47 seconds
startx to fluxbox = 8 seconds

...not bad for a suse user =o)

If you want to ask about useability, you should have made that clearer in your first post. The poll and the post refer only to speeds.

Just my £0.0111430

yeah, because i know some hardcore hackers would like to brag "hey, i got boot time down to 10 seconds", but they dont have much to brag about because they're sitting a at command line with no kernel hardware support, no services, and no programs to use for the CLI. anyone can brag about system boot, but its a useable system boot that im interested in. i shouldve made it clearer. i guess i just didnt know how to explain it.

boot time, for some people, is important for many things: you may have a dual boot with windows, or you may be running on a laptop with terrible, if any, APM/ACPi support, so you cannot standby/suspend (like my laptop), so to save downtime and battery, you have to shutdown. this is why i need a fast distro.

unfortunately, mdk10's boot time is around 30 seconds, not quite as fast as 9.0

i wonder if people's 2 cents (or pounds) raise or drop because of inflation lol.

My system boots much quicker than my Windows box and has very similar functionality. I really don't care about shaving off a second from my boot time - it really makes no difference to me if it goes to login in 15 seconds or in 16 seconds.

As long as it's fast when I'm in and it's stable (and it is) then I'm a happy camper.

The value of this 2 cents (or .011p) may go down as well as up. Your quotes are at risk if you don't keep them snappy. Terms and conditions can be found on the back of a stamp.

i dont know what i did, but mandrake 10's boot time is down to 23 second, from lilo to fluxbox desktop.

seems like my posts/polls go down the drain. i have 5 unanswered posts so far, and this polls going unnoticed.