Hi,
I have an old pIII 600mhz 128mb pc. I installed RedHat 7.1 with minimum packages without xserver. (I checked only the gcc and vim while installing with total install size under 280 MB ). But still it takes around 3-4 mins to get the login prompt. It seems to be starting several unnecessary services. How can I disable these unwanted services (esp the hardward detection module) and make my pc boot up in less than a minute? (I am trying to learn shell scripting and basic unix OS functionality)

I have windows 95 freshly installed on the same machine which boots up under 45 secs. It seems strange that a command line OS like unix takes 5 times more time to boot than a GUI OS like windows.

Thanks,
Suneel

you can edit "timeout" in lilo.conf / grub.conf

If i remember right, Red-hat and Fedora got a set of commands like this:
system-config-network
system-config-samba
etc..

That will only shorten the time you have to make a choice in grub or lilo. Better reconfigure the kernel, and remove any modules you don't have. When you use ``make xconfig'', you will have a very decent overview on what you're installing.

(That does not mean, though, that it will not take you ages to configure the slickest kernel you can )

Edit: that was in response to dudulz, of course.

I have sometime withou playin with RH n Fedora but...
Try "ntsysv" command as root.. disable all the shit u don't want
Also, (like was said before) recompile ur kernel. most distro try to enable things much more than u need.

Thanks for your replys. I am a begginer and compiling or reconfiguring the kernel seems to be a complex stuff. Please elaborate on reconfiguring the kenrel. I don't have xserver installed so I guess 'make xconfig' won't do any good. ntsysv seems to be a feasible solution...will try that out.

Thanks,
Suneel.

Try installing Gentoo, and you will be able to boot your system to the bash prompt in like 15 seconds.

Gentoo has all the required documentation to help you.

try "initng"
http://initng.thinktux.net/index.php/Main_Page

this got me from 2mins15 to 1min

install notes are here:
http://initng.thinktux.net/index.php...how_to_install

I agree with deroB. InitNG is just amazing. With it my pentium 4 boots in 6 seconds!

Hmmm. Maybe try a newer distro? RedHat 7.1 is pretty old. Maybe it's struggling with a particular piece of hardware. I have an old Celeron 400MHz system that boots in about 30 seconds on a stock Debian Sarge 2.6.8 kernel. And I even run KDE gui...

Kids these days are spoiled. If a boot up time takes longer than 5 minutes, you should worry. Making the boot time less can make it worst. Getting initng scripts to work with your Linux distribution is pain.

For Redhat like distributions, use chkconfig to enable or disable services for each runlevel that you do not use. By typing "service [service name] stop" as root or su - it will stop the service at that time. Redhat includes services that should not run at all like portmap and inetd or xinetd. Hotplug and updating the module list can take a long time.

Any distribution that I tried take the same amount of time at boot up. I do not care how long it takes if it is under 5 minutes and it does not crash. Gentoo is not fast as people say. It just runs fewer services. Gentoo developers have included parallel init service loading but an option have to be included in /etc/make.conf (I think) to do this. All my systems are fast in hardware but software is unable to speed it up.

What's wrong with the highlighted ones? Just like to learn; I use them to start ftp server and telnet server.

Unfortunatly that will not work for him as he hasnt install x-server and they are gui tools. Also those tools will not do anything to improve boot time really..

The best CLI for disabling services is probably chkconfig !

Whoaaaaaaaa! I just read this and thought i'd try it. Jesus - my suse 10.0 is usually sluggish as you like but now it boots in about 20 seconds. Crikey, and I thought Arch was a fast boot.