Improve performance in Ubuntu, from digg.

This is an index of threads on how to get the best performance out of your Ubuntu machine. The thread descriptions are as followings:

• Use InitNG as a replacement for standard Init.
• Speed up Firefox.
• Custom compile a new kernel.
• Make sure DMA is enabled.
• Use Prelink to make applications start faster.
• Pick the kernel that’s right for your processor.
• Disable uneeded services from starting.
• Use Swiftfox, a faster Firefox for Intel and AMD processors.
• Tweak your ext3/reisers filesystem for enhanced performance.
• Clean up unnecessary files.

Popularity: 19% [?]

When I try to upgrade my system, but I get the error below:

sojia src # emerge -uvDNp worldThese are the packages that I would merge, in order:

Calculating world dependencies …done!
[blocks B ] sys-apps/pam-login (is blocking sys-apps/shadow-4.0.15-r2)
[ebuild U ] sys-apps/shadow-4.0.15-r2 [4.0.14-r1] +nls -nousuid +pam (-selinux) -skey 1,264 kB

Total size of downloads: 1,264 kB

According to this page on http://forums.gentoo.org, the clue is in the shadow ChangeLog:

*shadow-4.0.14-r2 (12 Mar 2006)
12 Mar 2006; Diego Pettenò +files/login.defs,
+files/login.pamd, +shadow-4.0.14-r2.ebuild:
Merge pam-login back into shadow, as 4.x version was already being used;
this means that upgrade from 4.0.14-r1 requires to remove pam-login before.

To solve “emerge -C pam-login && emerge -1 shadow”, this is safe to do.

Update: Thanks Julian. It’s more safe to perform “emerge –buildpkgonly –nodeps shadow && emerge -C pam-login && emerge –usepkgonly shadow“

Popularity: 22% [?]

When you try to upgrade your system via portage system recently, you will find the error message as followings:

sojia portage # emerge -uvDNpt world

These are the packages that I would merge, in reverse order:

Calculating world dependencies
!!! Packages for the following atoms are either all
!!! masked or don’t exist:
sys-apps/fileutils

This is because sys-apps/sh-utils, sys-apps/fileutils, and sys-apps/textutils have been replaced by sys-apps/coreutils. If you want to get rid of this kind of warning, you must update your /var/lib/portage/world by your-self.

In other words, remove sys-apps/sh-utils, sys-apps/fileutils, and sys-apps/textutils these three lines in your /var/lib/portage/world, the warning will be gone.

Popularity: 17% [?]

Tune your ext2/3 filesystem, from Gentoo Weekly Newsletter (October 17th, 2005)

ext2/3 are the main filesystems for a large amount of users but what a lot of people don’t know is that you can get almost Reiser4 speed out of it without any of the instability they’d associated with Reiser4. One of the great features of ext2/3 is the ability to tune it by adjusting various parameters. The one we are going to modify here is dir_index which essentially uses hashed b-trees to speed up lookups in large directories.

Let’s take some precautions, first of all by finding out if some of those parameter are already enabled, by running
# tune2fs -l /dev/hdXX

(replacing XX with your drive and partition your ext2/3 filesystem resides in). If you don’t see dir_index in the list then we can enable it, and just in case you do see dir_index in ‘Filesystem features’ then you have either enabled it already or it was automatically enabled for you.

You are going to need a Gentoo LiveCD because changing parameters on mounted filesystems can cause problems, so in the interest of safety we are booting off the CD. At the start phase the Gentoo install system is booted into what’s called a “ramdisk” which is where the files needed are put into RAM to be used. mke2fs, tune2fs and other parts of the e2fsprogs package will be present at this stage.

Now let’s turn on the feature with
# tune2fs -O dir_index /dev/hdXX

Now run e2fsck with the -D option to have the directories optimized:
# e2fsck -D /dev/hdXX

Do that on any ext2 or ext3 partition and then reboot. You should notice the difference straight away.

Popularity: 10% [?]

Linux: Removing Older GCC Support, from kerneltrap.

大意是說以後用 GCC 3.2 以前的版本不能再 compile Linux kernel 了. 剛剛找了一下, RHEL 2.1, Debian 3.0 (woody), SuSE 8.0, Gentoo 1.2, Slackware 8.1 都是小於 3.2 的. 不過 Redhat 8.x, 9.x 和 Fedora Core 所有版本都是有 support 的.

Popularity: 10% [?]

The Future Of Devfs, from KernelTrap.

devfs 已經是欲除之而後快, 取代的是 Greg KH 從 2001 年寫的 udev.

Popularity: 10% [?]

Linus Torvalds 用 Git 來代替 BitMover 這家公司的 BitKeeper 後的第一個 Linux Kernel — 2.6.12 release 了.

你可以在 http://kernel.org/git/ 看看 web interface 的 Git. 比方說, 你可以看看 Linus 的 git tree.

Popularity: 9% [?]