Improving boot time has been a focus of Ubuntu developers in recent releases, with the goal of a ten-second startup set for Ubuntu 10.4.  To test progress thus far, I compared boot performance for Ubuntu 8.04, 9.04 and 9.10.  Below are the results, which demonstrate the impressive strides that have been made thus far towards a faster boot.

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.

he Ubuntu design team have published mock-ups of the proposed Ubuntu 9.10 Boot and GDM screens.

In a post on the Ubuntu-art mailing list, Mat Tomaszewski revealed the proposed designs, and confirmed the plan for Ubuntu to use a new boot-screen manager, replacing Usplash with Xsplash.

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.

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 freshly released Ubuntu 9.04 "Jaunty Jackalope" is said to have significantly improved its boot speed. So I got curious and decided to compare its boot performance to Fedora 10 and PCLinuxOS 2009.

There is focus on Karmic to boot fast, 10 seconds or so. My question is, does anyone out there actually care about boot times?

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.

As they announced the revamp of boot and login experiences in Ubuntu and received a great response from the Artwork Team, with many interesting concepts being submitted..