speeding up the booting process
 

i am planning to install linux but ive had past experiences that the booting process takes forever. what is the "fastest" distro and how do i edit the startup programs from loading ala msconfig in xp and win98se? suggestions would be most appreciated. i use the box for games only so that people have an idea what modules to disable at bootup. thank you.

you just have to dig thru all the boot files and take stuff
out. disable all the services. you can with
ksysv, i guess. and comment out stuff like delays and
network stuff you don't need from. the /etc/rc* files.

Visit the following url

<http://www-106.ibm.com/developerwork...xw03BootFaster>

nice article on speeding up the boot

Vector 3.2 is a "fast" distribution - as for speeding up the boot process, one way is to move symlinks to services that you dont need from the relevant run-level directory - the relevant directory for run-level 5 (in some distros ) is /etc/rc.d/rc5.d - so for example - to stop the "random number generator" from starting on boot up

mkdir /etc/removed_services

mv /etc/rc.d/rc5.d/S20random /etc/removed_services

the symlink to the actuall service has now been moved out of the /etc/rc.d/rc5.d directory, hence the service wont start on next boot up - you can follow the same principle for many services - but be careful and read up on what the services actually do.

Just To Add To Nimony's Post Above .....

This Recent Slashdot article discusses this ......
Booting Linux Faster
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=0...id=185&tid=187

I would rather boot once (Linux) than reboot daily (Windows) - therefore is boot time such an issue?

However it links to the same article from IBM that Nimony posted above , however you may find some of the comments helpfull?

Kinda weird the way hardware in the last few years has moved away from parallel devices, prefering serial devices;
PATA -> SATA (Parallel IDE ->Serial IDE)
Parallel -> USB
etc

Software however has done the reverse (read the linked article above) - for example in this stated instance services are started up in parallel and not one by one - Linux moves from a "Serial" to "Parallel" version (a mild - Multitasking extension)

All good fun, but interesting!