Improving boot performance of Ubuntu Hardy Heron

After the Hardy release the boot time had increased to more than 1 min.

First I followed the Howto available at Ubuntu Forums. But this how to was created for Edgy and I had Hardy

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=89491

Using sysv-rc-conf altered the following.

Could not find following processes that were mentioned in the HowTo
alsa, apmd, gdomap, gpm, hdparam, hotplug and hotplug-net, hplip, ifrename, ifupdown, ifupdonw-clean, inetd, inet.real, lvm, portmap, readahead, ssh,

These were the new processes that had come after edgy
apport, atieventsd, avahi-daemon, dhcbd, hal, keyboard-setup, libpam-fo, loopback, mysql-ndb,mysql, ploicykit, powernowd, procps, rc.local, rmnlogin, rsync, vbesave

Stopped loading following based on the explaination provided in the Howto - atd, bluetooth,cupsys, dns-clean, pppd-dns
Left hotkey-setup, usplash as it is.
This changed hardly made a difference of couple of seonds. But later realized usplash was contributing to the delay and this posts suggests not to select it in the cofig.

I could not find the Boot Up manager mentioned at

http://www.zolved.com/synapse/view_content/28311/Tune_Boot-Up-Manager_for_better_performance_of_Ubuntu

Thanks to the post at

Making Ubuntu boot in 19 seconds

I found bootchart. To install bootchart run

sudo apt-get install bootchart

Bootchart creates png image of boot activities at /var/logs/bootchart From bootchart I found that usplash was using CPU during the Boot. More the CPU taken up the process the bar will have darker shade of the blue.

Fixed the issue as per the thread

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=285920&page=3

Edit usplash.conf and set resolution to 1024x768. Though actual resolution of my screen is 1280x800 that makes splash and text move to the left.

sudo gedit /etc/usplash.conf

Once this is set reconfigure the usplash package or run the below command to update the theme. You can notice the additional parameter vga=773 in /boot/grub/menu.lst after you have run this.

sudo update-usplash-theme usplash-theme-ubuntu


After this boot time was reduced to 32 seconds and my splash screen also started working. Earlier I used to get a blank screen during boot and I was thinking thats how it works!

There is a startup-manager available to handle manage Grub configuration.

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