Step two tweak one broke my installation. X-server couldn't start. I did a backup of fstab and menu.lst but could only revert them using a live cd because / partiton was apparently mounted as read-only. I wonder if it has something to do with # comments in menu.lst not being unchecked? Be careful people!

As you can see from the screenshots in the guide, I've applied these modifications to my system with success. You probably copied the fstab lines in the example into your fstab file!

The lines in the menu.lst file are supposed to be with an # in front of them! The ones that are commented out are with ##.

Same here, tweaking /etc/fstab broke by graphical environment too. This is the 2nd time it happened. Frankly, I didn't think modify partitions would do this. Oh well, live & learn.

it also happened to me. could someone please tell me how to fix my /etc/fstab
i try: vi /etc/fstab but it wont let me save,
please help

In response to the not being able to save thing... you have to be a super user to save a file like that. So instead of just vi filenamehere type, sudo vi filenamehere

try using 'sudo' before this command

I can confirm that the fstab trick busts certain installs. It worked on my little acer xubuntu 8.04 and busted the file system for my ubuntu 8.04 desktop. i could not and did not copy paste as I use a third machine to show this tutorial.

on the fstab portion i did not find a significant improvement and would suggest just skipping it.

OgreProgrammer, I am curious to know what type of hard drives do you have on those computers you mention. Are they both SATA or IDE? Or one is SATA and the other one is IDE?

About teak one..I have to mention that on my toshiba laptop booting process is longer every time. It's like it's creating grub profile everytime it's booting. Is that normal ?

hey hows it going. i by no means am no Linux expert i aint even close to being an amateur but the entry into fstab errors=remount-ro, will for sure lock people out of their OS.when the drive remounts on boot and any mistakes are found. the system switches over to READ ONLY. on the / drive. therefore not letting anything load up right. thats why the X window wont open up.. my 2 bits on this one..and i know im right! :0)

Wrong! The "errors=remount-ro" mount option is already on your system, therefore it's not the one that "breaks" the installation... I've applied the tweaks on 4 computers.. all with success!

well mister linus tovald.or whatever it is. its teh solution for my particular problem. which is happening apparently to some other peeps.. so go ahead take off that mount on error . and the problem will be gone

well dude, maybe there is some sence in mounting / read-only when errors are found. and maybe the better solution would be to fix the errors, instead of forcing your system to ignore them... jm2c

How about how to do a preload of some often used programs like firefox, gedit, amarok, or anything else you can think of?

Preload is not good for your system! Trust me!

Why is preloading bad? And why should we just trust you?

"preload is an adaptive readahead daemon that prefetches files mapped by applications from the disk to reduce application startup time." - from the original description of preload.

You already have a readahead daemon running on your Ubuntu machine (see the first tweak)! Also, preload was used long time ago...

Please be a little more descriptive of what these tweaks actually do, and what the available options are!
b/w how did you encrypt the disk? alternate disk?

Yes, here is the tutorial -> http://news.softpedia.com/news/Encrypted-Ubuntu-8-04-85271.shtml

The tweaks are supposed to make the boot process faster with about 10 to 15 seconds less then the default installation... and will improve the overall performance of the system.

Hi!
after applying the hard disk tweak when i try to extract an archive with archive manager it says "not enough memory". i have memory left according to system monitor.
what can i do?
thanx!

Hi,
This is a good article, but ..
One important part is missing .. (Must do to avoid crashing)
In Step-2,after tweak one
run the following command --->
sudo tune2fs -o journal_data_writeback /dev/

This article is the first step to study linux recovery after unexpected power down. :)

Regarding the last step - the swappiness tweak. I think you need to go and read about how swappiness actually works.

First of all this step is completely unnecessary for a lot of users since most machines nowadays will have upwards of 1G of ram and will hardly, if ever, need a swapfile.

Swappiness only works it's magic when the system is idle, so won't be using up any system resources when you need them, and doesn't actually remove any of the information from ram, jsut means that that space can be used immediately if need rather than after a delay while the swap takes place.

Swappiness is generally considered to be a Good Thing and setting it to zero is only adviseable on very rare occassions.

There is a reason someone decided to code it in the first place, and why almost all distributions include it.

I am amazed that XFCE and other window managers have not been discussed when trying to improve performance on older pc's. I use XFCE(Xubuntu) because I like the un-cluttered environment and because I have an older PC (Athlon XP 1700 and 512mb RAM).

There are other similar options like Blackbox and Fluxbox but the advantage of XFCE is that it looks almost exactly the same as gnome. It is very much slimmed down so if you care that your icons perhaps are a little sharper or more detailed then don't bother. If on the other hand you would like to see plenty of old hardware in perfectly working condition then this is a great option and any of the above tweaks that work are still applicable. You could turn off all the background task it would just require you to navigate slightly different menus (better menus IMHO).

Also, if I could recommend not trying to un-install Gnome or KDE. It is very tricky to completely remove these desktop environments, rather boot a Xubuntu live CD, decide if you like the way it looks or not (bearing in mind that you can't really tell performance from a Live boot) and install from scratch.

One final note: You can still have Compiz! It takes a bit of Googling around to find a howto to get it working (to save you the time: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=203877) but Compiz still works

Could someone please post how to repair your system after step 2 broke it?

The problem is your are left with a system that is mouted Read Only, so you cannot change anything back.

here is my journey in the linux world:
ubuntu -> xubuntu -> debian xfce -> debian dwm (lightweight window manager, 30k of c code).

if you want lean and mean try debian.
it's almost identical to ubuntu but with less bloat.

xubuntu is also a great option, and you can try the alternate cd (it's the debian installer btw) which allows better customization.

the fstab tweak broke my system, changed my disk to read only.. my simple fix:

Boot from live Ubuntu 8.04 disk
PLACES menu, chose the appropriate drive, mounted
sudo gedit /media/disk//etc/fstab
changed back to relatime,errors=remount-ro

rebooted and all is well again!

X-server couldn't start but we can login using command line, type in username and password. Then type this command to fix problem:

sudo tune2fs -o journal_data_writeback /dev/sda1

it works for me
rgds

great tutorial!but i think the author missed an important point that removing the incomplete packages, isolated libries &residual Config package can also speed up ubuntu,please see this article for details:
http://www.linuxine.com/2008/06/speed-up-ubuntu-boot-speed.html

The hard disk tuning options are rather dangerous. Setting write back mode will lead to data loss in the event of a power failure. Only use these options if you have a UPS, never use these options on a laptop!

I tried this and now Ubuntu only boots to busybox lol.

But it booted to BusyBox *fast* didn't it?

nodiratime is implied by noatime, so you don't need both in there, just noatime will suffice.

I've got this problem to, and it's really annoying, but fortunately I installed Zenwalk 5.2 and see fstab configuration
"default,noatime"
and use this to my Hardy (just add noatime) and it works

but thanks for other trick, thats really useful

It is better to add:

CONCURRENCY=shell

to /etc/default/rcS as that file is later sourced by /etc/init.d/rc and is the more correct way to manage initscripts.

On Tweak two, do I add the the line to the very end of the file? This doesn't make sense based on what is shown.

Concurrency=shell used to work lovely before these last releases.
On 8.04 and Distro's based on 8.04 it breaks the network manager applet if yo change often. On Mint it 'breaks' the menu sometimes. I have installed almost 70 PC's & laptops with 8.04, so if your pc/ laptop does wierd things after the speedup, remove the concurrency=shell. Thanks 4 the tut!

I got the auto login to work! Thanks. BUT I rebooted after I wrote the first command line in /etc/fstab. Broke my Grub! How do I get back in to wrire the other lines? I can get an Ubuntu shell. Thanks,
Frank

Got it worked out. Thanks you guys, for all the help.
Frank

Thank u very much !

Please note that

concurrency=shell

will most likely inhibit mounting of encrypted partition via pam-crypt. No idea why that is, though.

I only used the swapiness tweak.
I have an ubuntu 8.10 install (note: 8.10 has not come out yet, i am using the Alpha 4 version, which is updated now to alpha 6)

Anyways, in my effort to understand swap better, i earlier changed my swap to as large as i could make it -- 15 GB on my laptop that has 512 ram. I had the hd space. Why not?

Anyways, i followed this tweak and turned swappiness to 100 and there is a HUGE change for how fast things load. I dont have a program to quantitatively show the difference in load times, but i can tell a huge difference.