Thought about speeding up startup...

[a-aa]

I'm personally a huge fan of starting gdm before a lot of other things.

I had gentoo on my laptop before ubuntu, and tricks I used there was 
starting gdm much earlier, before hotplug for example, I started hotplug 
right after gdm (both in background) and if I was really quick I'd be 
unable to move the usb mouse for about a second before hotplug found and 
loaded it).
There's of course the problem of something crashing, but there could be 
a debug/verbose boot option?  That disables loading gdm earlier, and 
parallel booting.

You might find http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=131142 interesting.
Goes into parallel boot (starting multiple services at once).
Loading gdm much earlier in the boot process.
Looks into some rediculus other methods ;)
And looks a bit at readahead that redhat uses.

Either way a lot of the boot services are either heavy on io or cpu, 
starting them simultaniusly cuts boot time a lot.

Note, mail'ed at 3:10am, so if it doesn't make sense I'll try to clean 
it up tomorrow ;)