In the quest for the fastest boot ever, you may want to consider setting the variable CONCURRENCY=shell in /etc/default/rcS, recalling from your your theoretical studies that "Parallel is faster than Sequential."

For a few years now, I have worked on a replacement for the trusty old way of organising the Debian boot. Did you ever make a package with an init.d script, and wonder which sequence number to pick for your script?

Ever wonder what makes a computer tick or how a UNIX® server does what it does?

Booting, or "bootstrapping" for us older folk, is that deeply mysterious sequence of operations performed by your computer between the moment when you switch it on and the moment it's ready for you to log in.

With just a few tweaks, your Linux box can be lighter, sprightlier and quicker than ever before. Read on for the best ways to speed up your boot sequence, optimise KDE and Gnome, and get better performance from your favourite apps. We've also got some top tips from our favourite free software gurus...

If you dual (or triple, or more) boot your machine, i.e. you have many different operating systems you choose between at startup, you might have to use your bootloader fairly frequently. GRUB is a very functional boot loader and can do the job in most cases. But its default text-based view is a little visually unattractive, is it not?

According to the peekabot project's Web site: "peekabot is a distributed real-time 3-D visualization tool for robotics researchers and developers, written in C++. Its purpose is to simplify the visualization needs faced by a roboticist daily—using visualization as a debugging aid or making fancy slides for a presentation, for example.

How to dual-boot Windows 7 and Debian 6 is the latest in the series of articles on dual-booting Windows 7 and Linux and BSD distributions. When attempting to dual-boot Windows and a Linux or BSD distribution, one of the most important decisions you will have to make is where to install the bootloader.

How to dual-boot Fedora 14 and Windows 7 is next in a series of articles on dual-booting Windows and Linux distributions. The first was how to dual boot Ubuntu 10.10 and Windows 7. That article gave detailed instructions on how to dual-boot, with GRUB installed on the MBR of the hard disk.