I am currently using Slackware 10.0 with the 2.6.7 kernel and my machine takes 40 seconds to bootup. Is this normal???? Can anyone tell me how to make it boot up faster.

Note: It used to boot up faster but then after some time (I didn't do any changes, just updates), it started to bootup slowly)

XPediTioN

Mine takes longer to boot up also, I think partly it's because my hard drive read speed has dropped off dramatically with the 2.6.7 kernel. You can check this with hdparm. Also there seems to be more going on in the bootup with the new kernel (ACPI, reiserfs journal checking, etc.). One thing you could do is not run the ldconfig every time you boot up - it's not really necessary unless you've installed new software. That will cut about 10 secs off the boot. I comment this step out in /etc/rc/d/rc.M and only run it after I install new software.

Xpedition, we can't know why your startup is too slow magically, maybe you just run a bunch of services at startup, dhcp discovery slows the bootup a little, running fc-cache too, and a lot of things do it too...

well, i took a look at the kernel .config on 2.6.7, and there are lots of things compiled as modules, best advice would be to compile the kernel yourself, just build everything you need into the kernel, it makes a huge difference, remeber that modules take time to probe and load.

enjoy :^)

You can also get lilo working a bit faster editing your lilo.conf like
Start LILO global section
lba32 # Allow booting past 1024th cylinder with a recent BIOS
# append="hdc=ide-scsi"
boot = /dev/fd0
message = /boot/boot_message.txt
compact #####this is the line you should add######
prompt
timeout = 1200
ans so on......
Make sure you have a boot disk by your side as this could cause problems with LBA32

It used to be very quick but now it takes a long time. I commented the ldconfig part in rc.M, and it does improve a little but it still takes a long time in the : Going multiuser... part. Anyone?
XPediTioN

For my part disabling hotplugin feature did improve boot speed and general performances too.

how do you disable that?

chmod -x /etc/rc.d/rc.hotplug but after that you may edit rc.modules or rc.local to add some modprobe lines to load your modules at boot.

I had 9.1 on my laptop which had been upgraded to current and therefore was at 10 booting OK, ldconfig the longest but not too bad.
Then I wiped it and did a clean install of 10 and now hotplug takes ages. Hdparm shows the disk is still at the same speed.