Monday, August 25, 2008

Tweaking eeebuntu

I've been running eeebuntu on my EeePC for a week now & I've done quite a few things to improve the overall experience.
Here's a quick list of things (that I can remember) in no particular order:
- Disable unused services. User services-admin to weed out all the pointless services such as: anacron, atd, apport, lm-sensors, avahi-daemon & cupsys.

- Disable unused startup items. Under System -> Preferences -> Sessions, turn off, Conduit, Evolution Alarm Notifier, Print Queue Applet, Update Notifier & Visual Assistance.

- Install much needed games. Get yourself zsnes, armagetron, planet-penguin racer, crack-attack, circus, pinball & wormux.

- Run sudo apt-get clean after every update.

- Remove unnecessary panel applets. cpu meter, temp meter & window picker (window list is more practical)

- Install lock-keys-applet to display the status of numlock, capslock & scrolllock.

- Fix the Fn+ key volume control. Goto System -> Preferences -> Keyboard Shortcuts. Press Backspace to remove the shortcut for Volume up, down & mute. This leaves only asusosd running & supplying only 1 set of controls. The volume being adjusted is Front, so set gnome mixer's primary volume to it.

- Setup some ramdisks to reduce disk writes. Add these entries in /etc/fstab
tmpfs /var/log tmpfs defaults,noatime,mode=0755 0 0
tmpfs /tmp tmpfs defaults,noatime,mode=1777 0 0
tmpfs /var/tmp tmpfs defaults,noatime,mode=1777 0 0

- To reduce some more writes. Add in the mount options for / in fstab "noatime, nodiratime, commit=30". Like this:
#/dev/sda1
UUID=xxxxxxx-xxxxx-xxx-xxxxxx-xxxxxxxxxxx / ext3 noatime,nodiratime,commit=30,errors=remount-ro 0 1

You'll need to do the same in /boot/grub/menu.lst.
On the line "defoptions=quiet splash" line add "rootflags=noatime,nodiratime,commit=30" Like this:
defoptions=quiet splash rootflags=noatime,nodiratime,commit=30

Then run $sudo update-grub.

- If you don't mind losing all your browser cache every boot, you can do this put all your disk cache in ramdisk:
Open firefox
Goto about:config
Look for "browser.cache.disk.parent_directory"
If it's not there, create it (type string) & set it to "/tmp"

- Optimize the boot readahead cache by reprofiling. Here's how to do it:
Setup the system in exactly the way you want it before doing this.
Press Esc at grub
Edit the kernel line & insert "profile" at end. (without quotes of course)
Press b to boot
Let the system boot normally to the desktop. (It will take much longer)
Once completely booted, do a reboot. (The next boot will be quicker than ever)

Next I'll be experimenting with cpu frequency scaling to improve battery life. I'm still apprehensive about this since this machine is slow as it is. But I'll test it out & we'll see.

3 comments:

unitz said...

wow, thanks

Hélder said...

I don't know what I did wrong but the last step (adding "profile" to the kernel line in grub) didn't work for me... I wrote ir, press b, but then I get a black screen for 10 minutes long... I restart but my system doesn't load anymore... Are you shore it works?
Anyway... good post!

Ter said...

Well I certainly did do this myself. It did work at the time. This was on Eeebuntu 1.0 almost a year ago. Eeebuntu is now at version 2.0, so I'm not sure if that still works.

Anyhow, I've since switched to using a light weight install of Mandriva 2009.1 with LXDE on my EeePC.