Hey guys, I just wanted to glean some sort of a general average and compare my system with everyones.

Please post your computers:

• boot time of course
• hardware specifications (processor, HDD, RAM, etc.)
• distribution
• if it's a laptop or desktop (or a netbook )

Mine is 43 seconds, running Ubuntu 9.10 on a netbook.
My hardware specs:
Intel Atom 1.6 GHz
320 GB 7200 rpm HDD
2 GB RAM

Under 30 seconds from the grub screen to lxde. Crappy dell desktop,with Debian Sid using insserv, concurrency=starpar, readahead, preload, prelink, GDM using autologin

System: Host craigevil Kernel 2.6.32-2.slh.7-sidux-686 i686 (32 bit) Distro Debian GNU/Linux squeeze/sid
CPU: Single core Intel Pentium 4 (UP) cache 1024 KB flags (sse3 nx lm) bmips 5586.64
Clock Speeds: (1) 2793.321 MHz (2) 2793.321 MHz
Graphics: Card Intel 82915G/GV/910GL Integrated Graphics Controller X.Org 1.6.5 Res: 1280x1024@60.0hz
GLX Renderer Mesa DRI Intel 915G GEM 20090712 2009Q2 RC3 x86/MMX/SSE2 GLX Version 1.4 Mesa 7.6.1 Direct Rendering Yes
Audio: Card Intel 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) High Definition Audio Controller driver HDA Intel
Sound: Advanced Linux Sound Architecture Version 1.0.21
Network: Card Intel 82562ET/EZ/GT/GZ - PRO/100 VE (LOM) Ethernet Controller driver e100 at port dcc0
Disks: HDD Total Size: 160.0GB (13.1% used) 1: /dev/sda 160.0GB
Partition: ID:/ size: 103G used: 20G (20%) fs: ext3 ID:swap-1 size: 5.25GB used: 0.00GB (0%) fs: swap
Info: Processes 122 Uptime 8:20 Memory 243.7/492.8MB Client Shell inxi 1.2.7

<10seconds here with Arch

EDIT: Just tried again, weird after the fbsplash update it went to 11seconds :\ so basically 9-11 sec.

Whats your computers specs? You have entered the sacred OMGWTFBBQLULZ zone.

I just timed it and it boots in about 38 seconds (the first 25 seconds taken up by the BIOS, though). And that's not including the time for Xfce to start, because I made mine boot into the command line.

Distro: Fedora 12, modified to boot to runlevel 3 instead of 5
CPU: Intel Core i7 920
Memory: 6GB
Form: Desktop

I don't have much of a hi-fi spec, just a core2duo and 2Gigs of ram on this PC and on laptop 4gigs. It's about customizing the initscripts, also background the daemons,ie parallel booting. I'm sure pixellany has similar boot time.
When using Slackbox, I managed to tweak it to about 40-45sec. Maybe I'm missing some other stuffs to configure to reduce boot time.

EDIT: Btw, by boot time I meant the time from boot menu to login screen.
Remember I use slim or xdm which load faster than gdm and kdm.

No, I haven't. What are you using to measure it? And from what to what?

My phone.

From pressing the button to desktop (auto-login).

About the time for a coffee to brew ...
Maybe less.

You could use bootchart:

http://www.bootchart.org/

I haven't tried it, but it looks OK for those who are really interested in boot times and what happens during it.

I tried it already.

I don't like looking at a graphical representation that big. [its like 4 times the resolution of my screen)

It's a nice program, but is hell on 1024x600 resolution.

I can't really test it right now, because every time I reboot my machine I have to reset the router to get back online.

However, I can estimate that from GRUB to gdm it probably takes anywhere from 30-40 secs. I could be being a little optimistic, though.

Specs:

• Intel® Pentium® 4 CPU @2.66GHz
• 1.5GB (1536MB) RAM (333MHz; yes it's slow )
• 3 hard disks: 320GB WD 7200RPM SATA (has Ubuntu on it), 40GB ATA (manufacturer unknown; has WinXP on it; came with computer), 160GB Maxtor USB External (data only)
• NVIDIA GeForce 7300GT GPU w/ 512MB VRAM
• Ubuntu 9.04 as primary OS

EDIT: Also, no fancy specialized boot scripts or anything like that, just the defaults

My time is about 35 seconds
Distribution is slackware-current, kernel 2.6.31.4
Celeron D 340 2.93 GHz
1 GB RAM
200 GB hard drive

My 64-bit machine boots in about 48 sec (from bootloader), this is an Intel Quad Q9300. It would be faster if I disabled HAL tho. The two biggest slowdowns during boot are while loading acpid and HAL, the rest are loaded quickly. I wonder if there's a way to get these to load faster ? I did background them in the startup scripts.

bootchart shows 14 seconds, about the same as the BIOS takes
Slackware 13/64bit, Celeron 2.2GHz, 4G RAM
Toshiba Satellite laptop