This is version 1.0 of “Howto: Set up Hardy for speed.”
This guide is a collection of tips and tweaks for Ubuntu Linux 8.04. The content comes from tutorials and speed suggestions found on the Ubuntu Forums and elsewhere. The material has been collated and narrated, and arranged with links to external resources or supplemental information.
The guide describes how to set up a faster Ubuntu 8.04 system, with an eye on machines that predate Pentium 4 models or require non-default settings to achieve better performance. Please read the Welcome pages for more information.
This howto is released under the GNU Free Documentation License, v1.2. Please read the included license page for details.
The guide is available in two forms: A Zim notebook and as a relative-linked HTML document.
The size of the guide and the material included does not lend itself to a blog post, although it could easily be incorporated into another Web site or wiki, probably with minimal effort. On a blog however, it would be too easy to make a mistake or miscode something.
Zim also makes it easy to convert the guide to HTML, which makes it a little more accessible to machines that don’t have an Internet connection, or lack graphical environments. It also makes the guide platform-independent, which means you don’t need to use Linux to read it.
The files are compressed as .tar.bz2 files, and are hosted outside of WordPress.com, which doesn’t allow that file extension to be uploaded. These guides are considerably larger than past guides, because of the inclusion of bootcharts and other visual elements.
The current versions can be downloaded by clicking on the links below.
Howto: Set up Hardy for speed, v1.0, Zim
Howto: Set up Hardy for speed, v1.0, HTML
For a command-line accessible link, please follow a link above to a download page.
To install the guide for use with Zim, decompress it into a folder, and add the folder as a notebook in Zim. The guide is introduced on the Welcome page.
To install the guide for use as an HTML document, decompress it, then open the index.html page in your browser.
For questions, corrections, ideas or suggestions for the howto, please feel free to leave a comment here. Translations and additional hosts are always welcome; I’d be more than happy to link to wikis, translations or revisions of the howto.
Enjoy!
K.Mandla
Version history:
v1.0, 4 May 2008
• Initial release
Great job, thanks for posting. 😀
Hi,
First of all, thank you for your great turorial. At the end you mention, that you consider building a custom kernel for Ubuntu to be a waste of time as the rest of the system as “Ubuntu isn’t built for speed — it’s built for generalities”. How can you quantify that? Which parts of the system are so generic, that the system runs slower than, say Slackware?
downloading 😀 thx
Hardy seems fast enough for me, just not stable–kind of like Ubuntu’s Vista, though that may be putting too sharp a point on it. The only fix seems to be a downgrade or some other distro.
Hardy is actually more stable for me so far than Feisty – it automatically discovers the hardware a little better than Feisty, and Feisty has had one lockup (due to binary NVidia driver) that I’m hoping Hardy will avoid.
People with different hardware will have somewhat different experiences of Hardy. It’s certainly nothing like Vista – it detects both new and very old hardware quite successfully. The new means it worked without hassles with a brand new Gigabyte P35 motherboard and Core 2 E8200, with NVidia card, and the old means it also ran very nicely on my old 512MB Pentium III at 700 MHz – try doing that with Vista!
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I have found Hardy to be relatively stable so far, and the hardware detection was a little improved on previous versions, it also did not hold a candle to other distros of similar nature such as PCLOS.
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Whew great thanks I needed this. There are still a lot of people using pentium 3 or less PCs – like me. I only have 256 RAM.
I get this error when trying to download the HTML or ZIM file. Any idea why?
XML Parsing Error: undefined entity
Location: chrome://mozapps/content/downloads/unknownContentType.xul
Line Number 55, Column 7:
——^