I’ve cut the starting services right back to the basics and set it to autologin but it still takes ages. It seems that even getting to udev takes considerably longer than it used to, plus there’s a very noticeable delay before X starts and the desktop is displayed.

For comparison my Fedora 11 machine (32 bit) running the same services regularly boot in 23 to 30 seconds.

It could be to do with the virtual machine since I has to create an xorg.conf due to a problem with Virtualbox guest additions and Fedora 12 but I doubt that’s the sole cause. I did read a bug report about probing for the floppy drive but that’s not my problem.

I’ll just hope that either a new version of Virtualbox or a future Fedora 12 update fixes this.

After installing and rebooting, my X server wouldn’t start. I dropped into a virtual terminal only to see that Xorg could not find any screens to use (Fedora 12 has no xorg.conf, it use HAL to detect the displays instead). This happens in both 32 and 64 bit versions.

It seems this is a general problem that can be fixed by creating your own xorg.conf with the required settings. The second link I provided has the fix.

I haven’t tried it myself yet but hopefully a new version of Virtualbox will soon fix the problem. It did occur to me that it would be nice if there were an easy way to uninstall guest additions to fix problem like this, at least then I could make a temporary fix to investigate the problem.