Many readers will have heard about Arjan van de Ven and Auke Kok's work to boot an ASUS Eee 901 in 5 seconds. Inspired by this work, and because I have the same laptop, I decided to try to reproduce their results. So far I have not come very close to their 5 seconds, but I have made some significant improvements compared to the default boot time for Debian on that machine; this article describes what I've done.
graphical linux boot screen