Draft: Gutsy beta release announcement

[Dougie Richardson]

Hi Matt,

<snip>

> Would you mind sharing your measurements?  Were these both fresh
> installations?  In my experience, a fresh installation will often boot
> more
> quickly than one which has been updated over time.
>
> While it's certainly possible that changes made to fix other issues have
> also provided a faster boot, I would be very hesitant to promote this as a
> feature of the release without a more concrete idea of the cause and
> concrete measurements.

I have set up to VM's each with a fresh install, One
7.04, one 7.10 and the 7.10 they boot to the login prompt in 2 minutes 5
seconds and 1 minute 15 seconds respectively. I used VM's to give a level
playing field.

Using the Live CD gives better results - 2 minutes 45 second for 7.04 and 2 
minutes 15 seconds for 7.10, both measured on an HP TX1250ea in default 
configuration, time taken from the boot menu having altered the kernel line 
(this laptop needs the "noapic" option).

I don't know if this is just my experience, but it is certainly faster here. 
Like I said, it's subjective and am not sure if it was intentional to 
increase boot time, if it wasn't then I'm not surprised it's not being 
promoted ;-) and can understand why not keen on promoting it.

Dougie Richardson
dougie at lynxworks.eu
http://blog.lynxworks.eu/