Decreasing Boot Time + Booting into MATE

[Gautam Goel]

Hi guys,

I'm a new user. I'm running 4.2 on an i3 Haswell. There are a few questions I 
was hoping you could help with.

1. How do you decrease the boot time? On my machine with an ssd, it takes 
more than 20 seconds from the time I press the on button to the time I'm 
presented with the login prompt. That's significantly worse than Windows or 
Debian, which is surprising since Dragonfly is so much smaller and more 
minimal. I notice two things: A. we are asked to press '1' to boot the 
standard OS, and B. the screen then fills up with the output of dmesg, i.e 
what drivers it can find and so forth. Is there any way to configure the OS 
so that it does A automatically? And any way to speed up B?


2. To get to my MATE desktop, I currently enter 'startx' at the command 
prompt. When I log out (within MATE), the screen goes black and nothing 
happens. How do I configure the machine so that A. it presents me with a 
graphical login screen at boot, not a command line and B. it allows me to log 
out and switch users from within MATE?


Sorry if these are dumb questions. I looked through the handbook and the man 
pages and couldn't find the answers. Thanks in advance for any help!