14 July 2021

What to do when Ubuntu's boot time is higher than it should be?

 I've always liked watching the Linux boot messages. So first, we can get rid of the "curtain" or the splash screen that hides those messages.

Execute:

sudo apt install -y gksu

gksudo gedit /etc/default/grub

In this file, remove the words "quiet splash", but leave the quotes intact.

 

From this:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash"

To this:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=""

Save and exit.

 

While you are at it, you could also remove the distasteful pink background:

sudo -H gedit /usr/share/plymouth/themes/default.grub

 

Change the color to something like 10,10,10,0.

Save and exit.


sudo update-grub


Now restart the system. In my case, there was a delay of one minute and thirty seconds. I noticed a message "A start job is running for dev-disk-by". 

 


This happens because one of the partitions on the disk has a unique id that does not match the unique id stored in fstab.


On opening fstab (sudo -H gedit /etc/fstab), I noticed that it mentioned a certain UUID for the swap partition. I ran sudo blkid and noticed that the actual UUID mentioned here for the swap partition was different.

So it was a simple matter of taking the UUID from blkid and replacing the UUID mentioned in fstab

Once this was done, the system booted without the long delay.