In December we wrote that Ubuntu 10.04 already shortened the boot time, which has been a great focus amongst Canonical and Ubuntu developers as they strive for a ten second boot. A lot has changed since that article.

The developers behind the Ubuntu Linux distribution aim to significantly improve boot performance. Their ambitious goal for 2010 is to reduce total boot time to 10 seconds.

Canonical expressed their plans to achieve a ten-second boot time in June of last year for Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, with their reference system being a Dell Mini 9 netbook. In February, we last checked on Ubuntu's boot performance and found it close, but not quite there yet, but did they end up hitting this goal for the final release of the Lucid Lynx?

Compare to earlier ubuntu versions karmic is much better in speed but if you still want to reduce your boot times use ubuntu boot Packages containing instrumentation to aid in boot performance work, and packages proposed to improve performance.

By the time Ubuntu 10.04 LTS rolls around next April, Canonical is interested in seeing Ubuntu boot on an Intel Atom netbook (specifically the Dell Mini 9) in less than ten seconds. These incredibly fast boot time goals even led Canonical to decide against investing more time in enhancing the boot experience with Red Hat's Plymouth.

While we have published hundreds of articles looking at various aspects of Linux desktop performance, one area we haven't covered much with Ubuntu (or any other Linux distribution for that matter) is surrounding the boot performance.

Now that you know what the overall goal is, how do you get from here to there? First, understand that if you have a computer running Windows 7, that Windows 7′s boot manager is responsible for making sure that the system boots.

Canonical has announced the availability of Ubuntu 9.10 alpha 6, the final alpha release before the transition to beta testing. Ubuntu 9.10, codenamed Karmic Koala, introduces a number of important architectural improvements and also improves boot performance, especially on computers with solid state hard drives.

When announcing Ubuntu 9.04, the Jaunty Jackalope, Mark Shuttleworth had hoped to make this next Ubuntu Linux release perform better and to boot "blindingly quick", in particular with Ubuntu beginning to appear on more mobile devices. Well, with Alpha 4 have been released earlier this month, are Canonical developers and the community in the right direction with making Ubuntu 9.04 boot quickly?