As soon as the official release was announced, I decided to upgrade my Intrepid Ibex to the latest version and see what it has got. One of the most praised features is the surprisingly short boot time. Combine this with the fact that it got announced on Friday morning IST, I wouldn't wait anymore to try it out, would I?
Usually, I perform the network upgrade where in it downloads all the required packages from central repositories and starts upgrade only after all the downloads are complete. If network connection breaks for some reason, the whole process is broken and has to be restarted. But still it used to do the job for me. But this time, due to a bug in apt-get, it somehow started ignoring the changes to the proxy settings. I use proxy server for my work, and I unset it in gnome-proxy-settings when I am not working for office. However, the update-manager does not recognize the change in gnome proxy settings. It takes the proxy settings from env variable http_proxy which I must have set some time back. Unsetting it and starting update-manager from the same terminal does solve this problem, but I found a cool and nice alternative anyway.
You can download and alternate cd from here. And then start the upgrade with one command: "gksu sh /cdrom/cdromupgrade". The rest is all usual process. But this time, it just a takes half an hour because you already downloaded all the packages. This looked like a much cleaner way to upgrade.
Then I timed the booting process. From the appearance of the BIOS screen, to the appearance of the Login screen, it took exactly 30 seconds. However, not all this should be considered as OS boot time. BIOS screen is persistent for about 8 seconds and then for about 2 seconds, grub shows its choices. So, the core Ubuntu OS boot time boils down to flat 20 seconds. And then, once I input my username and password, the time it takes for loading the desktop and my preferences is roughly 15 seconds.
In summary, flat 20 seconds of boot time for an OS is indeed a very good improvement.
Saturday, April 25, 2009
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