I disabled autoloading of the modules in my rc.conf file, and listed only the modules I wanted and shaved almost four seconds off my boot time!

I had to do it the hard way (is there an easy way?) — I took the list of modules I made with hwdetect, searched through the modules.dep file and sorted my MODULES=() line into the same order they appeared in that file.

It took me about a half an hour to do it, but a four-second improvement is huge on a 300Mhz Pentium II! 😀

My next task is to figure out why I have such a long delay between when X starts and when the desktop is ready. I have a feeling that might be related to my 24-bit desktop, and the fact that this screen is a transplant from a different model. I don’t know if I’m willing to compromise on either point, though.

If I can trim a few more seconds off the boot time, I’ll have this thing loading in the same range as my 1Ghz Ubuntu box, which only needs 31 seconds to get to the desktop. Hmm. …