I've just installed Mandrak 8.2 yesterday, and it seems to take forever to start up and shut down. In fact, whenever I restart of shut down, it seems to freeze and so I end up having to manually shut off the computer. Then the next time I reboot into linux, not only do I have to sit through the long start up process, but halfway through, linux repairs the errors created by the 'unclean' shutdown, which takes even longer. Linux seems to take even longer than Windows! Is this is a result of the way I installed it? I think I have something like 40 services that start at boot up (most of them are system services), if this makes any difference. Thanks for any help you can give me. God bless Hiran

It is slower than windows 98.. but it seems to take about the same time as windows xp to me. Try other desktop evironment like ICEWM or gnome... KDE is the slowest to load.

Tell us your installation procedure, and what you have installed.

I too found MDK8.2 slow to boot, too slow for my tastes. My current gentoo setup however is pretty quick.

I personally find all major Linux distros to take a while to boot. I am running a machine with XP pro and it takes 1/5th the time it takes Mandrake 9 or RedHat 7 Server. But Linux boots really quickly with a lightweight distro called trustix. Although not meant for a workstation.

An excessive number of services being run can be a cause of a long boot time. If you have a network and trying to use dhcp to get an ip address will give a very long boot time and may appear to hang when setting up eth0, syslog, sendmail and maybe others. Some installs are quicker to start than others. I have found recent redhat installs far slower to boot than an old mandrake 7.2 system. My current system (linux from scratch) boots in a reasonable amount of time. There are no unwanted services being started. For a filesystem try ext3 or resierfs. Both of these don't have the long disk check time that ext2 has after an unclean shutdown.

I'm using ext3 as the file system, which is a good thing since so far every time I've rebooted into linux, I've had to recheck the disk! As for my install, I installed about 2 gigs worth of packages. When it came time to configure the startup service, there was about 50 - 60 of them, but I deselected almost all of them except for the ones under the System heading and FileSystem heading. I scanned through those quickly, but wasn't sure what most of them were for, so I figured I'd leave them just in case. Like I said before I ended up leaving about 40 services selected, and most of them were System services. Actually, come to think of it, during both the boot up and shut down procedures, there are quite a few times where there doesn't seem to be any activity. With Windows, even when it's taking long, there usually is some activity going on (ie, hard disk whirring). Could this be due to a problem? Lastly, is the shut down procedure also supposed to be long? Because so far I haven't had one clean shut down. I'll leave it and come back, and it seems to hang, so I end up manually shutting off the power. God bless Hiran