I recently install Mandrake 9.1 on an older machine with a light installation (no KDE/GNOME/extra apps) and do not plan to use X11. However, the machine still takes about 4.5 minutes to boot up and I'd like to cut down on this if possible. There are 3 points at which the machine spends considerable time while booting:

• Finding module dependencies: (1 min 30 secs)
  
  Is it necessary to run depmod on every boot? If so, is there a way to cut down on the amount of time it takes to run (by removing modules or caching the results somehow).
  
• Checking for new hardware (50 secs)
  
  Not installing any new hardware.. My guess is this is harddrake running, can/should I disable it?
  
• Doing alsactl to restore mixer settings... (1 min)

I definitely want to keep the sound system running, but this seems like an awful long time to "restore mixer settings". Is there a way to turn this off or defer restoring whatever this is until later?

Besides these things performance has been very good for a K6-2 150, and the machine will happily play mp3s, serve web pages, and do file storage. Any help I can get with these issues or general pointers for reducing startup time would be appreciated. Thanks.

Although I have not used Mandrake in quite some time, it is similar to RedHat, thus the following should work.

You can use chkconfig and service to manage your Linux services.

"Checking for new hardware" is a service called kudzu.
"Finding module dependencies" is needed (unless someone tells me otherwise)
"Doing alsactl to restore mixer settings" is sound (I don't know why it takes so long, I'm not an expert in sound)

If you want to see a complete list of all services that are execute at startup for each runlevel, do
chkconfig --list

I can't locate kudzu anywhere in the installation. I was under the impression mandrake used harddrake as a replacement. Also, I can see the services through chkconfig and webmin and have turned off all the ones that I believe I can. That doesn't seem to address the 3 slowdowns I described above.

Mandrake uses harddrake. You may post he list of runing services, so others can tell you which ones you can turn off.

Since there weren't any obvious answers forthcoming I just went ahead and commented out the lines in the startup scripts that call these 3 programs. Everything still works and now the computer starts up in about a minute and a half.

I'll let you guys know if the thing crashes and burns...

Just uncoment the lines before you insert something new in your machine... (it should work if you don't plan such things).