Prelinking Guide- Make Ubuntu Feel Faster

[Yagisan]

I don't usually turn my PC off at night - I'll google for anacron but how can I make sure that it is running every day at midnight??

If it isn't already installed

aptitude install anacron

will install it. It basically makes sure that any jobs that were missed due to the system being off, are done shortly after the system being powered on.

Yeah, I tend to install new applications as I find out about them. It depends really.

Perhaps it would be better to disable prelink until you have a relatively unchanging system. Although on my system it only takes 1m 5s to run (it takes longer to run apt-get update on my system, 2m 14s)

[ace2005]

Um.. I only see

ace@Linux:~$ sudo /etc/cron.daily/prelink

In konsole when i ran it, do i have to keep waiting until it says something like finished, its been like 5mins and there is little disk activity

Should i have done this from the command line with the X server off?

What about the xcomposite manager, do i have to turn off the transparency and fade ins and shadows off too??

and do i have to close all the programs and stuff like Opera, Juk Superkaramba, Firestarter, and Azureus???

[bugmenot]

Right... what is something goes wrong ?

Last question: is there a way to prelink (and keep prelinked) just a few applications ?

Let's say firefox, openoffice and some more ? (I know tehre was ooprelink, but what a about other apps ?)

I also want to prelink firefox and openoffice, but not the whole system.
Does somebody know how to do that?

[ace2005]

Um.. I only see



In konsole when i ran it, do i have to keep waiting until it says something like finished, its been like 5mins and there is little disk activity

Should i have done this from the command line with the X server off?

What about the xcomposite manager, do i have to turn off the transparency and fade ins and shadows off too??

and do i have to close all the programs and stuff like Opera, Juk Superkaramba, Firestarter, and Azureus???

It took a while but it did finish but there was no output, does this mean it worked?

[GoldBuggie]

ace2005: Yes it means it worked!

HowTo prelink only firefox(have not tested it but this should work in theory)

The file that tells which directories that should be processed by prelink is the following:

sudo kate /etc/prelink.conf

Comment out the lines starting with -l by putting a # in front of that line. This way you can easily return to your previous state.

I've checked which files and directories firefox uses on my system(kubuntu 5.10 kde3.5) and having prelink traverse throu these directories should be sufficiant. So add the following to the above stated .conf file:

-l /usr/lib/mozilla-firefox
-l /usr/lib/gtk-2.0

Now there are more files that my firefox use (/usr/lib/libcairo.so.2.2.3, /lib/tls/i686/cmov/libnss_nis-2.3.5.so ...) but since I'm not sure which files that comes with your system I will not attempt to mention them here. Instead I think the 2 above directories should be the most imprtant ones.

If anyone knows of any important file that I should include that everyone uses then please let me know.

[Sionide]

It took a while but it did finish but there was no output, does this mean it worked?

Yep. No output is given. The first one will take the longest...

[poofyhairguy]

ace2005: Yes it means it worked!

HowTo prelink only firefox(have not tested it but this should work in theory)

The file that tells which directories that should be processed by prelink is the following:

sudo kate /etc/prelink.conf

Comment out the lines starting with -l by putting a # in front of that line. This way you can easily return to your previous state.

I've checked which files and directories firefox uses on my system(kubuntu 5.10 kde3.5) and having prelink traverse throu these directories should be sufficiant. So add the following to the above stated .conf file:

-l /usr/lib/mozilla-firefox
-l /usr/lib/gtk-2.0

Now there are more files that my firefox use (/usr/lib/libcairo.so.2.2.3, /lib/tls/i686/cmov/libnss_nis-2.3.5.so ...) but since I'm not sure which files that comes with your system I will not attempt to mention them here. Instead I think the 2 above directories should be the most imprtant ones.

If anyone knows of any important file that I should include that everyone uses then please let me know.

Sweet. Does this work?

[GoldBuggie]

actually only the only library you need to use is probably /usr/lib/mozilla-firefox but the gtk library has /usr/lib/gtk-2.0/2.4.0/engines/libclearlooks.so which is what firefox uses so I included it.

I'm going to run some tests this weekend with some different configs and a few more apps I'll return with the result as soon as I've done it. After that I can for sure tell you if more is needed.

[Nutterpc]

Can I also suggest setting prelink to use -amR

used it in my gentoo days, worked then, and it works now

Nice guide too, systems working well now

EDIT: Testing out prelink using -amR on Ubuntu.....will post back once I know how it goes

[GoldBuggie]

Ok tested with prelinking only firefox. Did some time testing as well. I will not post them since they will not show any improvement or chang on my system. Regardless of no prelinkning, full prelinking or only firefox. Maybe a test of seeing how the modules got loaded would be a better way but it would have taken more time for me

Anyway...I wanted to prelink firefox only(reduxing startup time at best). So prelinking is the way to go.

I first tried doing it the following way.
sudo prelink -vm /usr/lib/mozilla-firefox/firefox-bin

I got some trouble with not finding dependencies etc..so I tried doing a "-l /usr/lib/mozilla-firefox/firefox-bin" in prelink.conf but that didn't work as well. It seems prelink is bad at finding the dependencies so I have to manually add them.

On a i686 kernel(which is what I use) you will get 39 dependencies from firefox. For a i386 you will probably get 37 or 38. i686 brings a dependency on linux-gate.so.1 which is a file that does not exist(only in memory somewhere, look it up for more detail). So prelinking firefox means prelinking the remaining 38 files and its possible dependencies. Here is what you should put in your /etc/prelink.conf

####Firefox
-l /usr/lib/libz.so.1.2.3
-l /usr/lib/libfontconfig.so.1.0.4
-l /usr/lib/libgmodule-2.0.so.0.800.3
-l /usr/lib/libpango-1.0.so.0.1001.0
-l /usr/lib/libplc4.so
-l /usr/lib/libpangoft2-1.0.so.0.1001.0
-l /usr/lib/libnspr4.so
-l /usr/lib/libfreetype.so.6.3.5
-l /usr/lib/libplds4.so
-l /usr/lib/libgobject-2.0.so.0.800.3
-l /lib/ld-2.3.5.so
-l /usr/lib/libglib-2.0.so.0.800.3
-l /usr/lib/libexpat.so.1.0.0
-h /lib/tls/
-l /usr/lib/mozilla-firefox/libmozjs.so
-l /lib/libgcc_s.so.1
-l /usr/lib/libstdc++.so.6
-l /usr/lib/mozilla-firefox/libxpcom.so
-l /usr/lib/libatk-1.0.so.0
-l /usr/lib/libXfixes.so.3
-l /usr/lib/libXcursor.so.1
-l /usr/lib/libXrandr.so.2
-l /usr/lib/libXi.so.6
-l /usr/lib/libXext.so.6
-l /usr/lib/libXinerama.so.1
-l /usr/lib/libpng12.so.0
-l /usr/lib/libXdmcp.so.6
-l /usr/lib/libXau.so.6
-l /usr/lib/libX11.so.6
-l /usr/lib/libXrender.so.1
-l /usr/lib/libcairo.so.2
-l /usr/lib/libpangocairo-1.0.so.0
-l /usr/lib/libgdk-x11-2.0.so.0
-l /usr/lib/libgdk_pixbuf-2.0.so.0
-l /usr/lib/libgtk-x11-2.0.so.0
-l /usr/lib/libpango-1.0.so.0
-l /usr/lib/mozilla-firefox/firefox-bin
####Firefox

I was planning on trying some other software but at the moment it will not bring me anything since I will use the full prelink at this moment. Maybe in the future if there is some overwhelming demand on some software.

I went back to using the whole prelink since I felt my system wasn't as responsive as before(no scientific measurement only a feeling after have run prelink for quite a while) and I didn't want to go thrue which libraries would be best for kde.