Over the past couple of days I’ve trimmed my list of modules on this Inspiron 8000, under Arch. This is the list I’ve come up with, to my satisfaction.

MODULES=(cdrom agpgart intel-agp evdev psmouse serio_raw pci_hotplug rtc-cmos rtc-core rtc-lib ac97_bus snd-page-alloc snd-pcm snd-timer snd snd-ac97-codec snd-maestro3 soundcore ata_generic sd_mod ata_piix e100 mii usbcore usb-storage uhci-hcd)

I started by using the hwdetect --show-modules-order command, then trimming out things I knew I didn’t need (like parallel port or pcmcia support), and keeping things that I did (like all those sound modules). Some things get loaded anyway, as dependencies of other modules, but that’s nothing I can avoid.

This meant for an ide-legacy installation, which might change things slightly, if the newer libata-style (or whatever you call it) is used. I still have accelerated video, full stereo sound, PS optical mouse, USB access and wired network. And really, that’s everything for me.

Again, with these modules and a mkinitcpio that’s exceedingly sparse, I get a 27-second grub-to-desktop boot time under Openbox. And since I’m on the subject, this is the list of applications I use regularly.

pacman -S yaourt xorg hwd nvidia-96xx openbox obconf obmenu sudo kazehakase leafpad xfe gtk-chtheme ttf-dejavu audacious audacious-plugins epdfview mirage gcolor2 mplayer codecs tango-icon-theme-extras htop gtk-rezlooks-engine rxvt-unicode flashplugin

I’ve been using Xfe over PCManFM, since the latter needs fam/gamin to run, and I’m not a big fan of those daemons. Xfe does the same thing, looks good these days, and doesn’t need a lot of extras to do the job. And there is nothing, absolutely nothing in there that requires anything involving the word “Gnome.”

I think that’s about it. My system is fast, peppy and does everything I want.