Turning Off "Eye Candy" / Speeding Up Ubuntu

[greenblob]

I'm running ubuntu 11.04 (natty narwhal) on an acer aspire one ZG5 (a tiny under-powered net book) with integrated graphics & a 1.6 GHz Intel atom processor...

Ubuntu is a HUGE improvement from Windows in terms of speed, but could still do with a bit of a boost...

Any ideas on how I can speed up Ubuntu please?

Any features (e.g. indexing/graphical effects & animations/other un-needed services) that can be disabled?

Thanks in advance,
Luke

[sanderd17]

What desktop environment are you using?

If you are using Unity, you can't turn off a lot of effects. But you can install Unity 2D, which has less effects.

If you are using Gnome, at the login screen you can choose for Gnome without effects (the moment where you have to give your password).

If those are still to heavy, you could install LXDE of XFCE. LXDE is the lightest themable desktop environment that I know, and XFCE is a light concurrent of Gnome (almost same functionality, but no effects at all).

I'll list the best known desktop environments from heavy to light (my opinion, not scientific measurements):

Unity
KDE
Unity 2D
Gnome
XFCE
LXDE
openbox, fluxbox ...

[greenblob]

What desktop environment are you using?
If you are using Unity, you can't turn off a lot of effects.

Ahh, there's my problem, I'm running Unity... thanks for heads up.

How would I go about installing unity 2d, & how significantly would me speed increase?

I've installed "compiz-config", which has allowed me to turn off animations, but I can't turn any other effects off without half my GUI disappearing...

Thanks for the help,
Luke

[sanderd17]

How would I go about installing unity 2d, & how significantly would me speed increase?

Just search it in the software center or do

sudo apt-get install unity-2d

Unity is made for good graphical cards, and if you graphical card isn't so good, than the processor has to take the rendering as his job. A processor isn't made for graphics handling, so that costs a lot of calculating power.

When you use Unity 2D, then the graphics are a lot less heavy, so a light graphical card should be able to manage it without disturbing the processor.

How significant the speed increase would be depends on how good your graphical card is. If you have a good graphical card, than you see no difference between Unity 3D and Unity 2D. Because the processor has nothing to do with it. If you have a light graphical card, than you can see a big difference.

[Hralgmir]

There is an interesting post on the forums about altering the /etc/cron.daily/apt file to correct a problem with update-apt-xapian-index which was helpful for me using Ubuntu 10.10, although perhaps at some point this may be incorporated automatically. It could be worth checking though. Also I find disabling the Shockwave Flashplayer plugin which I installed in Firefox can be a performance boost when needed on the internet, and Adblock Plus software can have a similar effect. Neither approach is perfect on all websites though. Using the default desktop background rather than my photograph seems to save a second or so on boot up. Open a terminal and type top to see what is using the processor and RAM when the system is going too slowly, in order to see where the problems are. No doubt there are many more tips out there besides these.

[greenblob]

Open a terminal and type top to see what is using the processor and RAM when the system is going too slowly, in order to see where the problems are.

Excellent Idea, I'll try that now, thanks allot

[greenblob]

BUMP

Any more ideas please?

[2F4U]

Is Unity set as your desktop environment? If not, I am using Xubuntu (XFCE desktop environment) on an 8 year old ThinkPad X31 with 1.5 GHz Pentium M and 1.5 GB RAM and it runs surprisingly fast, even with desktop effects.

[smurphy_it]

Any ideas on how I can speed up Ubuntu please?

Get a real computer to run Ubuntu on


You could try turning off any services which you don't require.