My Kubuntu desktop

[MagnusB]

So, I "inherited" an old desktop after my sister since she got a new one (they were actually discussing throwing this one away). So I decided to take it under my wings and try to get Linux to run properly on it. The only hard part was that I have a USB wireless (which we gave up on in Windows), which were not supported out of the box in any Slackware based distro I tried (Zenwalk and Vector), but what do you know, Kubuntu connects straight out of the box, though the connection falters at time, and I need to un & re plug the dongle, but I can live with that.
Also I have no spent a few hours customizing and optimizing my installation, and I must say I am quite pleased with my self, though I have to improve the performance just a tad (disabling cupsys helps ALOT!). And I got Kickoff running! God, I love that one (see screenshot).
Overall I am quite pleased with the installation, performs well, got boot time down to 30 seconds, or less, still a bit sluggish at times, but I'll tend to that later.
But does anyone here got any experience with swapiness? I see a ton of guides recommending reducing the default value (60, I believe), but this box only has 256 RAM, so I am cautious about increasing the load on RAM, I think I am better served with a bit of swapping.
And preload, doesn't that take up some RAM as well? I'm not sure if the computer will be any more responsive with that install than without it, any ideas? Anyway, enjoy the screenshot, as I am quite pleased with my self after a hard days work

desktop.png (211.33 KiB) Viewed 715 times

[MagnusB]

I upped the performance quite a bit when disabling avahi-daemon as well. If you too are running a modern distro on an older box, use sysv-rc-conf:

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sudo aptitude install sysv-rc-conf
sudo sysv-rc-conf

It is a great way of easily deactivating daemons and services you don't need (like bluetooth). I also used some guides to shorten boot time and to increase the performance of the disk/file system it self, and I am pleasantly surprised by the result. I also reduced the swapiness, not sure whether that helped too much, but the computer is quite responsive now..
BTW, my system has a Intel Celeron CPU (2,40 GHz), 256 MB RAM (should check out how many slots I have and see if I cant upgrade it to 1 GB), Intel Corporation 82845G/GL[Brookdale-G]/GE Chipset Integrated Graphics Device (rev 03).

[lancern]

I upped the performance quite a bit when disabling avahi-daemon as well. If you too are running a modern distro on an older box, use sysv-rc-conf:

thanks for the all the info..what exactly is avahi-daemon?..when I tried to disable it..it asked if I was
sure..could cause data loss..

[MagnusB]

It is a networking daemon. It detects network printers, shares etc. I don't need that, so I disabled it...