Some weeks ago I installed Ubuntu Saucy Salamander on my Acer Aspire 5630 with 1 GB of RAM.

As it happens for other operating systems, the new release of Ubuntu is a resources hungry release. On my old laptop, the performances and the user experience are very poor. So I have modified some settings to get a better linux box.

To have a better experience and speed up ubuntu do the following few things:

1. Enable the additional drivers
– open system settings
system settings
– click on the "software and updates" icon
– click on the "Additional drivers" tab
– enable the best graphic driver for your graphic board.
graphic driver

2. decrease swap use
Linux balances between swapping out runtime memory and dropping pages from the system page cache, using the swappiness property. Swappiness can be set to values between 0 and 100 inclusive. Setting a low value for swappiness is important, especially for systems with les than 1GB of RAM.

I set the swappiness value to 10 on my laptop. Open a terminal window and then run the following command: 

$ sudo gedit /etc/sysctl.conf

At the end of the file, add this line: 

vm.swappiness=10

save the file and exit from gedit

3. Speed up file browsing
File browsing is a very repetitive job for an operating system, so if we speed up this job we can have better performances. Linux kernel handles a lot of caches, to speed up file browsing we have to tell to linux to prefer inode/dentry cache to other caches. 

As shown in point #2, add the following line to the /etc/sysctl.conf file: 

vm.vfs_cache_pressure=50

4. Disable file indexing
file indexing can slow down your ubuntu box. To disable the file indexing, open a terminal and issue the following command: 

$ sudo apt-get purge apt-xapian-index

 

Now it's time to reboot your system, mine is working faster…

Gg1