I have a fairly powerful machine. A 3-GHz C2Duo (45nm) processor. 4 gigabytes of DDR2 800MHz RAM. An FSB of 1333MHz. SATA chugging at 3GBps. A Geforce 9600GT with the latest (beta) driver installed. Yet, it takes 62 seconds for my Ubuntu installation to load up. And don’t get me started on application launch times or Firefox response times. I need more speed!! That too, without sacrificing eye candy.
So, I am starting Project Need For Speed. The aim? To configure a Linux desktop that boots in a jiffy (not setting any concrete goals here) and is light on the resources. No, its not Arch Linux for me. I need everything to be just download-able and installable/configurable. That, and my love for Ubuntu, drove me to try Debian as my distro of choice.
I debootstrap-ed a new partition with Debian Sid and installed a 2.6.26 kernel and pppoeconf onto it. Switching to that now.
Watch this space for regular updates on this!
Update 1:
Xfce4 desktop w/ GDM auto-login. Desktop ready to use in 21 seconds!!! That’s good progress! Now starts the part where I add in useful stuff and pretty them up.
Update 2:
Switched to E17. 16 seconds!! And the thing looks damn beautiful! Expect screenshots
