Optimizations for Mint/Ubuntu

PapiSolo · Post by **PapiSolo** » Mon Apr 16, 2007 7:47 am

Great find and thanks for sharing. I also tried a few of these. It's still to soon to say if any helped, but so far so good.

scorp123 · Post by **scorp123** » Mon Apr 16, 2007 2:51 pm

inigmatus wrote:Does anyone know if re-compiling and using your own kernel really gives you that much of a performance enhancement to make such an endeavor worthwhile?

Yes, it can ... Depending on what you do with your system it may be worth it ... or not. I personally don't bother doing this on my everyday desktop machines. I once had to construct a server which had to be responsive all the time no matter what the customer would throw at it so we tweaked everything to the extent where it became madness, including the Linux kernel (e.g. we threw out everything and just left the few things in there that were really really needed ...) ... but that was a totally different story. If you think you know what you do you can go ahead and do it yourself. If you consider yourself still being a "newbie": Don't bother. Present-day Linux distros ship with OK-configured Linux kernels and you don't need to mess with it anymore (unlike back in 1996 when I started ...)

exploder · Post by **exploder** » Sat Jun 30, 2007 5:36 pm

The "How To" is here now http://www.xsol.se/?p=26

I used these tweaks with no ill effects:

Aliasing hostname to localhost

Disable pango

Swappiness

Disable IPv6

Run boot processes in parallel

I used these tweaks on a HP Pavillion a1723w, it seems to be a little snappier!

exploder · Post by **exploder** » Tue Jul 03, 2007 11:40 am

Thought I would add some more information about tweaking Mint.

I installed preload, seems to speed things up a bit.

On my system I got rid of the update notification, it frees up some memory and I check daily for updates with Synaptic anyways.

I also removed Tomboy notes and the search from the panel.

Turned off the bluetooth service. I have no bluetooth devices.

Memory use is very good at start up, 169 mb. Before tweaking things memory use at start up was around 202 mb.

So far no ill effects, I will post back if discover any problems.

carlos · Post by **carlos** » Tue Jul 03, 2007 12:33 pm

If anybody has some time it would be great to add these to the mint wiki. Great links like this can get lost in the forum after awhile.

carlos · Post by **carlos** » Tue Jul 03, 2007 12:52 pm

And change your spam filter with the lube

exploder · Post by **exploder** » Wed Jul 04, 2007 2:31 pm

I tried building my first custom kernel yesterday. The kernel booted fine with no errors at all! I had one little problem, two CD-ROMs showed up in "Computer". I have asked some questions on the Ubuntu forums and maybe I can get it sorted out.

If you have never tried building your own kernel, let me tell you it is king of fun. As long as you leave your current kernel installed you can switch back if the new kernel should have problems.

I followed the instructions on The Master Kernel thread on the Ubuntu forums.

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php? ... ter+Kernel

newW2 · Post by **newW2** » Wed Jul 04, 2007 3:49 pm

I have a question about preload. Is this safe to run? Will using it mean that there is a vulnerability that can be exploited? Coming from the Windows background makes one hyper sensitive

This is the description for preload in synaptic:

adaptive readahead daemon
preload monitors applications that users run, and by analyzing this
data, predicts what applications users might run, and fetches those
binaries and their dependencies into memory for faster startup times.

Note that installing preload will not make your system boot faster
and that preload is a daemon that runs with root priviledges.

Thanks.

exploder · Post by **exploder** » Wed Jul 04, 2007 4:57 pm

Preload is safe to run. It does what the description says, it helps start commonly used applications faster.