Comment 153 for bug 128803

if you want it free youve got to be willing to spend some time wrestling with it..

luckily ubuntu has worked very well on the several machines i have installed it on, for myself and others. however every single one of them had quirks, some of which took a LONG time to figure out, and other less serious ones i have yet to figure out.

the nice part about problems is it forces you to get personal with your machine and actually learn what the computer is doing rather than simply looking at a splash screen?

if you can, put ubuntu back on the machine, all updates, then make a bootchart.. that little program was very useful in diagnosing problems because it visually attaches the time elapsed to individual processes. it has allowed me to explore the scripts in my system i did not even know about.

sudo apt-get install bootchart

the charts (pictures) will be in /var/log/bootchart/

make one of those during the 5 minute wait and maybe we can visually see the culprit in your specific installation.

another possibility would be to disable usplash altogether, so you can see the output instead? an easy way to accomplish this:

sudo apt-get install startupmanager

then look under System > Settings > Start-up Manager
good luck to ya