I was fiddling around with Fedora (6), one of the major Linux flavors. After installing it, i found out it took quit some time to boot. As i am not a Linux specialist, i was looking around for some help to see whether i could speed up the boot time. I finally found this thread about Bootchart: this allowed me to get info on what was going on during boot. Together with a list of processes on Linux and whether they are needed for what you want to accomplish, i was able to almost half the boot time.