I started getting mildly interested in boot time performance and benchmarking after I purchased my RD510 laptop and installed four instances of Jaunty on it. Very soon, I learned that the default installation, with no tweaking or modifications, yielded a handsome 18-second boot on the third installed system, located on the slow end of a fairly standard 5,400rpm laptop disk. The results on the first disk were even more encouraging, just 15 seconds. I believed that if my laptop were equipped with a 7,200rpm disk, I would have broken the 10 second barrier.

I skipped Karmic on my production machines, but Lucid is a different story altogether. I love the distro very much; it's slowly replacing Jaunty as the major Ubuntu flavor on my various machines. This begs the question, does Lucid bring in any improvements required to break the 10-second barrier?

Read on and you'll see.