Alright, let me tell you about this thing I was messing with the other weekend, I started calling it my “bunny boot” project. Had this old single-board computer lying around, you know, like a Pi or one of those things. It was gathering dust, and when I fired it up, man, it took forever to boot. Really sluggish. So, I thought, why not try and make this thing boot up super quick? Like a bunny, you know? Fast.
Getting Started
First thing’s first, I backed up the entire SD card. Learned my lesson years ago about skipping backups. You just don’t do it. Once that was safe, I plugged the board in, connected a monitor and keyboard, and just watched it boot normally a couple of times. Then I popped open a terminal.
I started digging into the boot process. The main tool for this, for me anyway, was just looking at the system logs. You can see what services are starting up and how long they take. It gives you a rough idea of where the delays are.
Finding the Slow Parts
It wasn’t rocket science. I quickly saw a bunch of stuff loading that I just didn’t need for the simple task I had in mind for this board later. Things like:
- The full desktop environment. Heavy stuff.
- Bluetooth services. Wasn’t planning on using Bluetooth.
- Network managers waiting for a connection, sometimes timing out.
- Some other default services I didn’t even recognize.
Basically, a load of default stuff that assumes you want a full desktop experience.
Making it Faster
So, I started trimming the fat. Went in using the command line, mostly `systemctl`, and began disabling services one by one. Big gains came from disabling the graphical interface startup. Just booting to the command line saved a huge chunk of time right away.
Then I went after the network stuff. I configured a static IP address so it didn’t have to faff around asking for one every time. Disabled Bluetooth completely. Found a few other minor services related to printing, sound, and other things I wouldn’t need, and turned those off too.
I thought about messing with the kernel, maybe compiling a smaller one. But honestly, that felt like overkill for this. Wanted to see how far I could get with just configuration changes. Keep it simple, right?
Also checked the SD card speed. It wasn’t the fastest, but it didn’t seem to be the main bottleneck after seeing how long the software side was taking. Decided to stick with the card I had for now.
Testing, Testing, Testing
Every time I disabled a service or made a tweak, I’d reboot. Had my phone stopwatch ready. Yeah, pretty low-tech timing method, but it did the job. I’d watch the boot messages fly by and hit the stop button when the login prompt appeared. Did this maybe ten, fifteen times? Each time, I noted down the time. It was satisfying seeing the number go down bit by bit.
The Result: A Bunny Boot!
In the end, I got the boot time down quite dramatically. It wasn’t instant, obviously, but compared to the original crawl, it felt lightning fast. Quick enough to be genuinely useful for the project I had in mind. It felt good, taking this old slow board and making it snappy again just by cleaning up the software load.
So that was my little “bunny boot” experiment. No complex coding, no fancy hardware mods. Just digging into the system, understanding what was running, and cutting out what wasn’t needed. Sometimes the straightforward approach is all you need. It was a fun way to spend a Saturday afternoon.
