In my instance of Virtualbox no OS has taken more than 25 seconds to boot in the past several year, but Centos took ~2 minutes that is insane for a modern distro. The slow boot issue isn't your computer it's some level in the boot process that I have not fully evaluated.
for reviewing the log files, the centos log file names aren't quite what I am used to but we can work around that, once you have su'ed into root mode you can enter the /var/log/messages directory by typing "cd /var/log/message" and review and of the files by typing "less {filename}". If you find a partial message from a program but don't know what log file to look at you can search the contents of all flies, lets say you want to search the logs for an error message that contains the work icon, you can type "grep -ri icon *", this tells the system to search all files in the current folder and the sub-folders for any file that contains the word icon in any case pattern, once you find something that matches you content you want you will see the filename on the left with a ":" between the filename and the message, you will then know what file to review with less.
