This simple and brief tutorial is going to show you how to speed up your snail-slow laptop by tweaking your Ubuntu system. There’re some tools and apps to improve the overall performance of an Ubuntu powered machine. They are really helpful if you have an old machine with the hardware that are out of date.
Improve Performance with ZRAM on low RAM machines:
ZRAM is a is a module of the Linux kernel that creates a RAM based block device which acts as a swap disk, but is compressed and stored in memory instead of swap disk (which is slow), allowing very fast I/O and increasing the amount of memory available before the system starts swapping to disk.
This gives amazing performance improvements on systems with low RAM. Especially netbooks! Search for and install zram-config from Ubuntu Software Center. Then restart, zram is running silently as a background process.
Speed up application loading time by using Preload
Preload is nice little application that could make your linux system a lot faster. Preload is an adaptive readahead daemon. It monitors applications that users run, and by analyzing this data, predicts what applications users might run, and fetches those binaries and their dependencies into memory for faster startup times.
Preload is available by default in Ubuntu Software Center. Just search for and install it, then it’ll run silently as a background process. If you want to further tweak Preload, conf file is available at /etc/preload.conf.
Speed up Unity desktop by disable graphics effect:
Unity 2D has been dropped since Ubuntu 12.04, it’s no longer available in higher editions. If you’re using Ubuntu with Unity as its desktop environment, you can turn off the graphics effect to get a better experience.
To do so, create file .xprofile on user Home folder and open it with text editor (You may check if it already exist by press Ctrl+H to view hidden files). Add below line and save it:
When you’re running your laptop on battery, Ubuntu dims the screen after a few seconds of inactivity. It annoying and here’s how to increase the timeout.
Objectives:
Increase Ubuntu screen dimming timeout on your laptop
Enjoy!
To get started, open dconf Editor from the dash search results.
In next window, navigate to org -> gnome -> settings-daemon -> plugins -> power. You’ll find the key which says “idle-dim-time”, change its value to what you want.
UltraStar Deluxe is a free video singing game. It allows up to six players to sing along with music using microphones in order to score points, depending on the pitch of the voice and the rhythm of singing.
The UltraStar Deluxe official ppa repository is not available for Ubuntu 13.04. You can install the DEBs for Ubuntu 12.04 and it runs well on my laptop with 32-bit system.
To download the DEBs, you may check 32-bit or 64-bit by going to top-right shutdown menu and choose ‘About This Computer’.
Did you ever get the Unlock Login Keyring prompt that says “The login keyring did not get unlocked when you logged into your computer” or “The password you use to login to your computer no longer matches that of your login keyring”.
There’re two reasons. One is you are set to auto-login, the other is the login password was changed to different to your keyring password.
Objectives:
Get rid of annoying ‘Unlock Login Keyring’ prompt on Ubuntu 13.04
Enjoy!
Open Passwords and Keys utility from Unity Dash.
In next window menu, go to View -> tick By keyring. So that you get the sidebar. Right click on Login and choose Change Password.
Input original password (the password you set when user created), set new password to be the same as your Ubuntu login password.
For auto-login user, set new keyring password to none by leaving it empty.
That’s it. The installed executable script is /opt/downverter/Downverter. But Ubuntu keeps looking for /opt/downverter/downverter when you open Downverter from Unity Dash. To fix this problem, run below commands to rename it:
Ubuntu desktop keeps going blank or dark when it is idled for a certain time. That’s not good if you’re watching movies on screen. Here’s the guide to stop your screen being turned off.
Open Brightness & Lock from Unity dash search results, or from System Settings
You’ll see the window as the below picture shown. Select “Never” in the drop-down box after where it says “Turn screen off when inactive for”.
That’s it! There also provides options to disable lock screen and dimming.