Mutant Turkey Talk

Pimp My Ubuntu.

“Howdy, I’m Calvin and I’ll be your guide this afternoon, I would ask you to refrain from speaking during the educational video, and also to keep you hand and feet inside the vehicle till it comes to a complete stop. Thanks and have a nice ride.”

Preface:

As you probably know i spend most of my time working on machines you would probably call old, pretty old. Currently my best machine is this one. (AMD Sempron 1.4ghz 1.5gig ram 80HDD) so you can see that i’m not really what you would call high tech, bearing in mind that is my BEST.

The problem with these old computers is that you can’t run GNOME or Firefox or any other Memory suckers if you want a fast system.  So I’ve compiled a list of ways you can get your machine running faster. here we go.

Sorry to XP/Vista Users. you might find something good here: Black Viper

---

I. Switching Environments/Use A Window Manager

First thing you’ll want to do is to stop using GNOME or KDE, and install Xfce4.It’s fast and less bogged down so it  will definitely help speed up your computer. If you want something even more geared towards being lightweight you can try LXDE *lightweight desktop enviroment*

Even lighter than any desktop environment are Window Managers, they just manage the windows and don’t include any goodies. Try Out Openbox or Fluxbox.

Install Xfce4 or if that doesn’t work type “sudo apt-get install xfce4″ in your terminal.

Install LXDE or if that doesn’t work type “sudo apt-get install lxde” in your terminal.

Here are the homepages for more reading

Xfce4 homepage

LXDE homepage

---

II. Removing Unneeded Crap

this section basically covers how to reduce the overall memory footprint of your whole computer environment on startup.

Part A: Removing Dock Applets

This part all you do is to do is get rid of your unneeded desktop applets, they all take up a couple MB ram each and slow down performance. Getting rid of extra panels and combining them helps too ;]

Part B: Disabling Services / Autostarted Apps

After that:  Menu > System > Services. Disable any you don’t need. if you don’t have Bluetooth, you don’t need the service running. if you don’t use sound ever you don’t need sound services running. etc… Here’s a Screen Shot if you’re confused.

Edit your autostarted apps. It’s Under Settings > Settings Manager > Autostarted Apps in Xfce. get rid of stuff you don’t need, and probably don’t notice is even there.

---

III. Stopping Services and Scripts from executing on startup

This parts a little more tricky, but It helps reduce boot-time noticeably. that should get rid of unneeded startup items.

A. Install rcconf (click here or use “sudo apt-get install rcconf” in your terminal

*EDIT - - - - I found that using bum instead is alot more user friendly. so sudo apt-get install bum should help you out)

B. Follow this list of Utilites (doesn’t cover all but gets most of ‘em!)

C. Reboot. If it doesn’t work go into recovery and run rcconf and reenable it all.

Pretty Simple. Pretty Damn Effective.

---

IV. Memory Efficient Software.

Conky, A lightweight very versatile system monitor that acts as part of your desktop background. It  won’t make it faster but is a great program to help monitor performance. It originally forked off of Torsmo but its now completely original!  Here’s a  Screenshot

PCMan File Manager, A tabbed lightweight file manager, [and desktop manager] desiged  with simplicity and ease of use kept in mind while it also has a low memory footprint. I did a blogpost on the program and you can read about PCMFM here.

LXpanel, which you can get as part of LXDE as a whole, is a lightweight panel that looks good, is effective but doesn’t suck up your resources, It’s what I use! =D that should be good enough for you.

RXVT, a low key terminal that’s super fast. =D doesn’t waste space like GNOME-Terminal or X-Term.

Links2, a Textbased or Graphic Based Web browser which is fast, and uses around 8mb of ram when running. better than Firefox’s 100+. the slight drawback is it has problems using newerly designed websites. for example it won’t load facebook properly.

V. Tweaks

Remove a few Gettys:  Go into /etc/event.d/ (make sure you are root) and delete a few tty’s. They each take up around 500kb and you won’t ever really need to use six of them, I use two. tty1 and tty2. Don’t delete them all because they come in handy if your X server ever gets messed up.

Uninstall Avahi/Gfvs: if you don’t use Avahi, or gvfs uninstall them, they waste space too.

 

 

 

I’ve only got one tweak for firefox users, that will help save tons and tons and ons of memory.

type in About:Config> Rightclick> New> Boolean> config.trim_on_minimize > True.

it’ll save you tons of ram.