Good karma: an in-depth review of Ubuntu 9.10
 

The growing popularity of Linux on netbooks has created a strong incentive for distros to boost their boot performance. Canonical hopes to deliver a 10-second startup with the release of Ubuntu 10.04 next year. In Karmic, they have already taken the first steps towards achieving that goal, but the changes won't help everyone yet.

The most noteworthy boot performance optimization that was introduced in Karmic is sreadahead, a prefetching service that will massively reduce startup time for computers with solid-state drives (SSD). We discussed this feature back in September when we showed that the final Karmic alpha release booted in only five seconds on a computer with an SSD.

http://arstechnica.com/open-source/r...ubuntu-910.ars