We have a look the almost impossible task of
trying to speed up Linux
Linux, by its very nature, is quite a
slender beast. Although there are some distros that are somewhat over-bloadted,
it is by no means a resource hog. Even with only a couple of gigabytes of RAM
installed in the system, you’ll never likely use more than 60% of the available
system resources.
Nevertheless, there are ways to improve on
the already rapid response time of a Linux distro. As with most operating systems,
there are elements and processes that could do with trimming down a little, or
perhaps removing altogether. The boot times could be always have a few seconds
shaved off them, and the applications could launch a little faster, plus that
shutdown could be done a bit quicker as well.
A lot of people use Linux on netbooks, and
after several months of good use, they tend to slow down a tad. Nowhere near as
much as a Windows installation would do after the same amount of time or use,
but enough to make significant difference to the day-to-day operation. After
all, you most likely use a netbook for quick browsing or other such tasks.
Wouldn’t it be nice to regain even a small fraction of that initial OS
installation speed?
With that in mind, we decided it was time
to run through a few options that will help get your Linux distro back into
shape.
Back up before you go on
As with all tweaks and tinkering, it’s
always best to make sure you have a working and very recent backup of your work
before you go ahead and do anything. The tips and tricks in these next few
pages have been selected to minimise and chance of out and out failure. We know
that, because we broke our test Linux installation a few times with various
tweaks. Luckily, we were using the test environment inside VirtualBox, with a
couple of snapshots, so the damage was minimal. If it’s possible, you should do
the same, or at the very least take a snapshot of your drive before the
tinkering commences. That way you can always revert back to a working state
should things go a little foul.
Let’s not dwell on such doom and gloom,
though. Instead, let’s see if we can speed things up a little.
Test machine
While we can’t offer tweaks for every
distro, we decided that it would be best to go with the most popular version of
Linux, Ubuntu or use another Linux may complain, but you have to admit, that by
at least using Ubuntu we can include Mint and a whole host of other special
guest appearances.
Either way, we tested the tweaks on a
dual-core AMD, with 2GB RAM and a 40GB HDD. It’s not a bad machine, so it was
already pretty fit, but we wanted to see just how much quicker we could get
things running.
Updates
Linux is pretty good when it comes to
dishing out updates. Instead of making a bulky application even more bloated,
the developer genuinely tries its best to fix any bugs and wipe out the
problems that may be causing the Linux-using public a headache. So in most
cases, the best way to speed things up, and make sure that your system is in
tip top condition, is by making sure you have all the latest updates.
Usually this can be accomplished via the
resident update manager, depending on what particular Linux distro you’re
using, but generally you can check for updates and upgrades by typing the
following into a the terminal:
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt get
upgrade
Should Linux pick up anything new, it will
ask you if you want to download/apply the update, in which case you should
answer ‘Y’, for yes. While this may seem very simplistic to Linux gurus, you’d
be surprised just how many people ignore the updates that pop up. For those of
you that do ignore those updates, you could be missing out on some radical
changes to the kernel, the very heart of the OS. These include better power
management, improved resource allocation, better file access and read times,
and speed increases due to enhanced handling of the core code.
Running
an update will yield good performance results
