the fastest distro by default
 

I gave Fedora Core 3 to my friend. He installed it then told me that it is slower ( booting time ) than Windows. This give me a thing to think about. It has been a very long time since I use newbie friendly distro like Mandrake, Redhat/FC...... I have read many threads.... From what I read and my experience, the distro like Mandrake, FC, and Suse has longer booting time than Windows and distro like Debian, Slackware, Gentoo has a little longer booting time than Windows. Summary : by default, distro like Debian, Slackware, Gentoo are faster than distro like Mandrake, FC, or Suse.

What I mean by booting time is default booting kernel time and loading the process, load the gdm or kdm, then launch the desktop like gnome or kde.

Has thing been changed???? I wonder whether Mandrake, Suse, and FC have improve their default booting time?

Btw, what make me sad that even distro like Debian, Slackware, Gentoo can hardly beat the Windows booting time ( until ready to work in desktop ). The only way they can beat Windows booting time is using desktop like xfce or fluxbox. Gdm and Kdm took about 5 seconds before showing up. From gdm or kdm to gnome or kde, it tooks.... 5-10 seconds.

However what distro do you thing has fastest booting time by default ( without tweaking ) ?

Well, if you take into count the fact that you have to boot windows 3 or 4 times a day because it locks up and freezes, then any Linux distro is faster in boot time on the whole. Many distros out there today search and scan for new hardware and changes at every boot. If you choose a distro where you can configure your kernel modules during the install process, your boot time is blazingly fast. Bonzai Linux is a great example.

romei, the problem is,

Windows XP for me is as stable as Linux desktop. Except installing new application, I rarely have to boot. I am not the only one ( I think )

Linux boot time process is important when u use laptop. Okay, if u use Linux as server, who need rebooting anyway????

Really?

You can try my distro. Mine boots in about 1/3 of the time that it takes to boot Mepis, Linspire, Xandros and others like it. Even the live CD is faster.

http://featherweight.dangerousron.com

Ron

The fastest distro I've ever used that came that way "out of the box" is yoper since it prelinks automagically for you.

the majority of what causes slow boot times depends on what services/daemons are being started on system loadup.. on a notebook.. you obviously don't need things like apache, mysql, sendmail, etc... therefore.. by removing these items, the boot time will be dramatically decreased.. if you want to get faster still.. turn off hotplug.. not a good idea for a newbie..but it will lessen boot time significantly because on every bootup, hotplug scans the system for new hardware and loads all the modules for existing hardware.. If you simply add the needed modules to /etc/modules.conf or /etc/modprobe.conf (depending on kernel version) then you load up what is needed and not worry about it...

Fedora, SuSE, etc.. install a ton of unneeded software that starts on bootup if you go with the default install... This is an attempt to be 'user-friendly' I think because that way, people don't have to....*gasp*... start services??

If you would rather use Windows because it boots faster.. use Windows... if you want to use Linux.. use Linux.. I personally use Arch.. and it's fantastic.. but meant for more intermediate to advanced users... To me.. it's like the perfect blend of Slackware and Gentoo...

i686 optimized binaries
excellent package management
excellent system for compiling from source or building installable packages from source...
all manual configuration
updates are released often
and best part of all.... it's a metadistribution...

Metadistributions are distributions that are rolling releases.. meaning you don't 'upgrade' to new new versions.. as long as you keep all your stuff up-to-date, it's the current version.. Gentoois this way, and I *think* debian is the same?? There are others.. but it's early monday morning and I'm tired ;)

I hope this helped to shed a little light on why some distros boot faster than others..

Yes basically it's hotplug and detecting the IDE devices that take time during bootup.

While you cannot do anything about the latter, you can turn hotplug or whatever is used to detect your hardware off and load the modules from your modules.conf/modprobe.conf/rc.modules or whichever file is used to load modules at startup.

Note that I do not recommend turning off hardware detection because ALSA still would not work (even with the modules loaded) without hotplug for me. But I don't know about others.

you can customise to make your distro really lean and fast, like don't compile i18n or debugging, use high optims, fiddle with hdparms, prelinking, kernel patching, shutting off unnecessary services at boot time (also a security recommendation), reiser4 is pretty fast, and other like tricks.

But if you're lazy and want out of the box then yoper's pretty good ;) gentoo if you're willing to do a tad more work,

oops, double post :|

It's all about configuration
 

If your system is configured to start a bunch of hardware checking and assorted daemons, yes it's going to take a while to boot up. My Gentoo laptop is configured to load all the modules I need to get up and running without the need for automatic hardware detection.

My slow little lappy boots up to the display manager log-in in just a few seconds.

What about this???? From gdm to functional gnome desktop tooks about 45 seconds while Windows login page into functional Windows desktop tooks about 22 seconds????

You need to understand something here... Linux is a command-line operating system that can run GUI applications... Windows is a GUI operating system that can do some command-line work...

With that in mind... when you recieve the Windowslogin screen, the majority of the Windows GUI is already loaded.. (which - BTW, is only explorer.exe and couple other minor items) When you login to GDM, at that point is when it starts pulling up everything involved with GNOME... Linux does focus on performance.. but more so back-end system performance rather than GUI performance...

Sure, Linux is great for resurrecting old hardware... but there seems to be a trend of people expecting Linux to be some magical force to bring their old, dead boxes back to top-of-the-line functionality... it ain't happening....

How do I know which modules I need to load into modules.conf? Is there a way to see which modules are loaded by hotplug?

Thanks

--C

I use Arch Linux and I've done some tweaking, I've made my own tweaks to the bootscripts (nothing hardcore, a fastboot patchset would smash my edits) and I've disabled hotplug in favour of my own kernel built with my modules compiled in. Now this sounds like a lot and it wasn't easy but mycomputer boots from when I press the power button to X within 30secs. And thats with memanually logging in and typing startx. Now if I supply my IDEdevices in the kernel line and turn off the IDE detection (which is my next rainy day task) I bet I could shave even more time off that.

However, Arch by default booted faster than any other distro I've used and runs incredibly quick. It would even be on par with my Gentoo setup which I used before I moved to Arch and there everything was compiled from source and I made extensive use of USE flags and the compiler optimisations.

coldsalmon: Run lsmod, that'll tell you all the modules loaded and then from there you cn work out which ones are necessary for your hardware and through trial-and-error move forward. Hotplug bu it's own admission loads as many modules as it can to try and make sure your hardware will work so you may not need all of what's listed.