Hi, I'm installing Slackware for the first time and I read in the guide that I should make an initrd and use the generic kernel. I did, and I thought that would make booting faster but it's actually slower by a couple of seconds. It takes about 40 secs booting from either kernel. Is this normal? Did I do something wrong? I'm so scared I'm going to mess something up because I'm not used to having to do so much stuff.

That's about normal.
You can edit /etc/lilo.conf and add the word "compact" at the top of the file (after the comments section). That will speed up the boot process somewhat.

And: Improving Slackware Boot Time, by Woodsman.

And yeah, that boot time is normal on a normal hard drive. On an SSD it's much faster.

Compared to some other distros, Slackware does boot a bit slow. I'd echo dugan by saying that yours is about normal.

First split that boot time into two parts - Kernel and the rest from Init. There is nothing much you can do to reduce the boot time of the kernel (except lilo compact line) and the rest since initrd is mainly slowed down by massive index rebuilding which can be disabled if you wish so. I however would not care about boot time at least on the desktop as it is once-a-day event. I have that 40 seconds to wait till I get the prompt.

I'm not worried about it, but 14.0 does seem to take a bit longer to boot (from lilo boot-screen to KDE desktop) than 13.37 did.

I've often wondered the same thing and wonder if anyone with the technical skill would take those parts of rc.M and that cause the delays and create some sort of run-once type script for them for first time boot after initial installation and then only run again when those parts referenced are updated/altered.
If I knew how to go about it I would probably have a go myself. Unfortunately my knowledge in that area is sitting at 0%.

Actually it would be fairly simple script that would store the cache updating result somewhere in a system and if the results are either missing (first boot) or out of date, the cache's would be rebuilt. Only question is to find out how to determine if the cached data is out of date or not. Anyhow with such a setup the script could run on every boot and would not consume more than couple of milliseconds to figure out whether to start update process or not.

Refer to comment #3.

Quite honestly - who the h... cares how long it takes to boot and how impressive the boot-screens are?? (well, quite some few obviously see this as a problem).
So folks - how often do you boot? One of the huge advantages of linux is that it just goes and goes and goes and ... ya get the jist?? I had a server (runni ng slackware, what else?) that I didn't boot for 3 years - there were some unattended boots because of power-glitches (no ups!), but never more than a couple of times a year. I can't remember the last time I booted my primary desktop - probably in November sometime ...
So - if it takes 20 secs or 4 mins - I don't really care. It is not like that 'other OS' where rebooting is the order of the day.

Just my 2c-worth ...

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Yeah, I get that, but that's running from a cron job, rather than when booting and whilst a valid and alternative way of completing said task is not what I had in mind.
Thanks for the suggestion though.

I to have a server running, so can't disagree there, but not so good for laptop users though, which I also have and just gets booted as needed.

Some of us don't have very much money and wives who say "what do you mean you left it on all night? Was it doing anything? No? Then switch it off when you finish."

Better a daily boot than a few days with no electricity.

Besides, since I put SSD drives in my machines, they boot real fast.

Workstation: Would be longer, but I have upgraded to -current on this machine 3 days ago.

Laptop:Hibernation does not reset the uptime counter.

Fileserver:Usually about a month or two, but I had shut the machine down to remove dust from that machine.

I don't care about boot-time, but I am using SSDs in my machines, so I have faster boots than normal users anyway.
I have absolutely no problem with that, my Windows install can run for days without a reboot.

Use hibernation, boots faster and after power-on you are exactly where you shut down the machine.

Rename the script to rc.housekeeping, move to /etc/rc.d, and run from within your rc.local as a background task.

Because many people shut down their systems at the end of the day. Electricity costs money.

My computers are turned on, on a need basis. When my computing session finishes, I power down.

Here, btw, is Pat's statement on why it takes so long:

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...ml#post4328130