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10 Powerful Tricks To Speed Up Your Linux Machine

I found it on meme Center and deemed it Interesting.

There are situations that force people to use older laptops, desktops, or any of its hardware components. That said, we still want them to work as close to our current standards as possible; therefore pulling hundreds, no, thousands of users to the world of linux. That may be but an overstatement, for speed and performance is just one of the perks of living with a linux computer.  

Let's say you've chosen your distro but you feel that the speed of your currently installed distribution, regardless of hardware, still isn't satisfactory. 

Here's a couple of killer tips to speed up your already sped up distro; minus the hardware version, crippled elderly computers, and the user's gender preference bias.

But first, I'll recommend updating everything through the "Update Manager" and patch the kernels too.


I. Speed Up The Launching of Softwares

Okay, you're here for magical rainbow-pooping, speed-racing unicorns, right? You aren't? 
That's a bummer.
Awesomeness to the awesomiest level

But I am right about the speed part. Needless to say, in an exemplary thrive for speed, we'd want our apps to poop rainbo—
I mean, start up and perform quickly right? (Especially if you have an attention span of poop, which is none. Wahaha hahaha haha..... Okay, I'll be quiet now.)

On my laptop, GIMP starts up after about 29 seconds. Not much? Though it does seem fast enough for an old laptop, we're talking "faster" here; FASTER, HOT, EXCITING, EROTI

Well, the point is that after this trick, GIMP starts in no more than 8 seconds (I tested it like 20 times, logging out and logging in after every test so I'm confident with this one :) 

Let's dash to the actual process:
  • Install "prelink". 
    • You can either download it through the browser or through the terminal (I'm on the ubuntu-based linux mint) by typing "sudo apt-get install prelink".

    • Turn on prelinking by editing /etc/default/prelink (as root, a'right?) and changing the line that says "PRELINKING=unknown" to "PRELINKING=yes"

    • Initialize the prelink database by running the command(on a terminal, and without the quotes, of couse) "sudo /etc/cron.daily/prelink"
    • At first this will take a while to complete but will update reaaally quickly everyday
    • Enjoy the ultra sped up software launching! 

II. Speed Up the GRUB

So this time, we'll be speeding up your booty ah, I meant... Bootloader. If  you have dual-or-whatever-number booting set up because you wanted windows or something to run alongside your linux distro, you'll be familiar with the menu screen that GRUB gives you when you 'turn on' (don't think of perverted things) your machine. 

By default(on linux mint, at least), this is 10 seconds. You could press Enter, but if you're away from your machine, and you want it to boot up faster, you could give it a sensible timeout like... 0.05 seconds, no, 3 seconds should work pretty fine if you aren't a supercomputer with the ability to react and choose your operating system in 0.05 seconds.
Unless you're this guy.


The process:
  • Go to etc/default and open the file grub (as root).
  • Change the value of GRUB_TIMEOUT=10 to 3 (or 0.05 because you are an super fast supercomputer. )  Then again, if you aren't dual-booting you could just set it to 0.
  • Fire up a terminal and run "update-grub"to.. ya' know.. Update the grub. Though it's more like "to make it take effect"
  • Aannd... You're done!




 III. Speed Up by Changing Swappiness

The swappiness value manages the ability of the kernel to move (because they can't afford rent) processes out of the physical memory onto the swap dick ....I mean disk. Yeah, I totally meant that. 

After watching "Boku wa Tomodachi ga Sukunaii",
I can never look at mecha genre anime the same way again.
Because disks are much slower than RAMs,  the system and applications will kick in slow response times if processes are too aggressively moved out of memory (Tss.. I told them to pay their rent early.) 

To check the current status of swappiness (Either single or virgin), open up a terminal and punch in: "cat /proc/sys/vm/swappiness"

The default value is 60. We don't want that. They couldn't even pay that much rent. That's where the infamous Albert Einstein got the equation (Change of Swappiness) = Happiness. 
Or was it just me?

And that's just what we're going to do :
  • Open /etc/sysctl.conf  with superuser rights.
  • Edit the highlighted file (sysctl.conf) with your favorite text editor (because you wouldn't want to change it using your least favorite text editor. Then again, that isn't mainstream. You could be a world famous hipster for using your least-favorite text editor)
  • Look for this line (If it doesn't exist, add it);
  • vm.swappiness=60  and change it to vm.swappiness=10 .
  • Save the file and reboot the system for the changes to take effect.

IV.  Speed Up by Using zRam

With the almighty zRam, you can optimize the functionality of your computer's RAM. 
Because you've always wanted to control your own army of RAMs from across the globe without any restrictions whatsoever through a single supercomputer which was actually the mind and spirit of your long lost brother implanted in a computer you love the most, then you find out the truth and finally reconcile with your beloved brother and live happily ever after(no homo) .
"I really missed you, computer onii-chan!~"
To install it:
  • Add the repository "ppa:shnatsel/zram" by punching in the terminal "sudo add-apt-repository ppa:shnatsel/zram"(Linux Mint) or whatever way your distro adds repositories.
  • Update your repositories by "sudo apt-get update"(Linux Mint).
  • And finally, install it by "sudo apt-get install zramswap-enabler"
  • Now, may you be united with your beloved brother.


V. Speed Up by Optimizing System Startup

If you're a masochist and have skipped the obvious searching the menu for the startup applications and disabling what you do not need,  disabling all visual effects through searching the menu for effects and other stuff like that, well actually, don't skip it. That's a pretty great way to speed your system up. But that's not what we're going to discuss in this bit.
MM!

Perchance you are using a Multi-core CPU (a badassery of the badasses), you can use all of its cores during startup.

Here's how to do this magic:
  • Look for and edit the file /etc/init.d/rc (with a text editor of course). 
  • Locate the line CONCURRENCY=none and change it to CONCURRENCY=makefile .
  • Presto!

VI. Speed Up Through Lightweight Alternatives

In the vast, vast world of opensource, a outside-underwear wearing hero comes along and gives you lighter and more comfortable alternatives to wearing your undergarments the conventional, mainstream way. 
Just like your apps, desktop manager, and distro itself.

The availability of these lighter alternatives are like... Everywhere... Lighter-weight apps are, needless to say, depending on what you're using your computer for, so what you download is pretty much up to you.

Now we'll talk about the lighter desktop managers and distros.
You can start by switching to a lightweight display manager such as XDM, instead of LightDM, GDM or KDM that comes with your distro. XDM isn't as pretty as the other's but it has a reaaallyy low demand on your hardware. 
Defying that one, you can also switch to a lighter window manager such as Xfce, Openbox, Enlightenment, and other window managers. They're usually available on your software distributing applications.
Defying both of the above, you can go all-out and switch to a lighter weight distro like Puppy Linux, Lubuntu, CrunchBang, etc.


VII. Speed up Your Wireless Internet

For the mainstream wireless sets of chips, a simple 'Magic spell' (tweak sounds more professional but I'm currently into fantasy anime right now, so back off) is sufficient to increase the speed and connection quality of your wireless Internet. Well, long-story short, we'll just be disabling the power management for the wireless chipset. The price is but a slight increase in power consumption, but that's a small price to pay to be able to faster stream Henta.

Here's how to do it:
  • Install gksudo and leafpad by "sudo apt-get install gksudo leafpad" 
  • Find out what your computer calls your wireless chipset by punching in the terminal "iwconfig"
  • From this, you'll be able to not only see the name of your wireless chipset (in my case: wlan0), but also whether the Power Management is on. When it's off, or if it's not mentioned, you obviously won't need to do anything.
  • Punch in the command: "sudo touch /etc/pm/power.d/wireless"
  • Next, this one: "sudo chmod 755 /etc/pm/power.d/wireless" 
  • Now, we'll need to put some text in the file you just created: "gksudo leafpad /etc/pm/power.d/wireless"
  • Now leafpad launched with an empty file entitled "wireless". Copy and paste the following text into the empty file 
  • #!/bin/sh
    /sbin/iwconfig wlan0 power off
  • Save and exit. Check "iwconfig" if your power management is off. If it is, then you're good to go! 


VIII. Speed Up by Not Checking Hard Drives All the Time

( Note: This will disable Linux from checking your hard drives every time you boot.. it speeds it up a lot, but if something goes wrong with your hard drive, you wont know! )
Be careful with this step, skip it if you want to be 100% SAFE

Here's how to do it: 
  • Launch a terminal and type "sudo gedit /etc/fstab"
  • A file will open. Look for the line that says "UUID=2a782d1e-fc91-4bbb-b86d-c139bb2d3f46 / ext4 errors=remount-ro 0   1"
  • See the 1 at the end? Change it to 0.
  • Do it for your swap or other partitions if there are 1's next to them too.
  • Restart!


IX. Speed Up by Clean APT cache

If you're a clean freak, or someone with a severe case of OCD, or just someone who happens to wander into my blogger site because of certain stuff I'd rather not ask about, you'd rather have a clean place than a filthy, polluted one like your crazy uncle's underwear drawer, right?

Especially if you're this guy
You can easily clean the apt cache by entering "sudo apt-get autoclean" in the terminal. There are also other cache cleaning services like "sudo apt-get autoremove"

X. Speed Up by Using "apt-fast" Than "apt-get"

For the whole blog I've been muttering lots using "apt-get", right? I meant this as half-a-joke, but.. Please don't kill me.. There's a faster alternative to apt-get, and that is...*drum roll*.... Bananas!   "apt-fast"! Now, I'm imagining you cursing me for not putting this bit at the top of the blog. 
Now, I'm laughing.
Just kidding.

Apt-fast is a shellscript wrapper for "apt-get" that improves update and package download speed by downloading packages from multiple connections (stimulateously) simultaneously. If you frequently use the terminal and apt-get to install and update the packages, you may really want to give apt-fast a try. 

Here's how to install it via official PPA:
  • Open the terminal and type in the following:
  • "sudo add-apt-repository ppa:apt-fast/stable"
  • "sudo apt-get update"
  • "sudo apt-get install apt-fast"
  • Now, you'll just need to change the habit of punching in "apt-get" into "apt-fast". It works for every apt-fast bit in the terminal!


If you have any questions, feel free to comment or message me, and I'll do my best to ignore it, I'll try checking the situation out.. 

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