Visually Seeing Your Boot Speed With Bootchart Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx

Have you ever wanted to know what your computer did while it booted? Are you new to linux, and want to understand what actually went wrong? Are you frustrated with the speed of your boot?

Well look no further. There is an awesome software called bootchart which is available via repositories for most major Linux Distributions. This software will visually chart out, what is taking the resources while booting, gives you a nice bench mark of how long it took to boot, and if you’re having slow boots, it’ll help you track down where your problem process is.

The installation on the newly released Ubuntu Lucid Lynx 10.04 is quite simple.

You can install using:
sudo apt-get install bootchart

The above will also install the required package: pybootchartgui.

Now all you have to do is reboot your machine. This can be done via the terminal with:
sudo init 6
Note: The above switches you to runlvl 6, which indicates a restart.

Once your machine has booted back up, all you have to do is check out the .png file that was saved for you in /var/log/bootchart.

You can open the said picture, and be greeted with a great graph of your boot-up process.