Keep It Simple Stupid. #
Today over beers with some of the Novell hackers I wrote a new session manager for GNOME. It goes like this:
#!/bin/sh
eval `ssh-agent`
gnome-settings-daemon &
gnome-panel &
nautilus -n &
beagled --bg &
gnome-screensaver &
exec metacity
Login time on my machine, as measured with a stopwatch, has been
reduced from 10 seconds to 3 seconds (warm buffer cache in both cases),
and my computer now has more free memory.
The panel draws itself
in one second, and two of those seconds are just waiting for Nautilus
to draw the desktop. With preloading during boot and a fix for the slow
Nautilus desktop rendering, I think it's probably possible to have a
1-2 second login on most hardware. [nat friedman]