Does anyone out there know any tips and tricks to make SUSE boot faster? I am having trouble even with simple tasks such as specifying what to run at startup.

Thanx,
-Sean

There's only one real way to make suse load faster. Buy a new computer. Lol....

Oh well. Now seriously.
Compile your own kernel. Start it out with a make oldconfig and then a make menuconfig and suse will keep its bootup graphics and everything. Then take out everything you don't need or want. Then after youve done that and got a nice working kernel, go into yast runlevel editor and turn off everything you possibly can.

Does this include the time it takes to load KDE/Gnome? If so, you can try a window manager like Fluxbox, Icewm, OpenBox, etc. which will really cut down the load times as far as a desktop is concerned.

I have tried several of those, and I prefer gnome, but thank you anyway.

linux:~ # make oldconfig
make: *** No rule to make target `oldconfig'. Stop.


This is what I get.

/me goes into the /usr/src/linux directory...
/me starts to build a kernel in the normal method...

make clean
/me watches the fancy output
make mrproper
/me watches the lack of fancy output
make oldconfig
/me watches a couple hundred Y/N questions flash by and auto answer themselves...

What suse are you running? Old version or did you upgrade. 9.2 has it and works fine...

How do you build the kernel? Can you please give me step by step directions. You dont need to go into too much detail, just tell me what commands to use and what those commands do.

Thanks,
-Sean

This is not an answer to your kernel question, but the initial one:

try to disable unused services in the runlevel editor. And have a look at the bootmessages, so you can see where the system takes the most time.

Personally, I think a new kernel won't speed up your system. SuSE kernel are highly modular, so what you throw out of the kernel wouldn't have been loaded in a proper configured system anyway. I am running a stripped kernel right now, and booting isn't faster at all.

Open Yast -> System -> Runlevel Editor, go through that list and think about services that you don't need. Simply switch them off.

You could buy more RAM, that may gives you some speed also.