Wednesday, April 9, 2008

Speed up Gnome in Ubuntu: Tip2

Another simple way to speed up your desktop is to install preload. According to Wikipedia, this program uses Markov chains to guess what libraries you are likely to use next and loads them into memory when the demands on your system are low. This is especially useful at bootup because you know you want to load libgtk-x11 among others. It should also learn which programs you use most often and load them while idle.

It would be nice if it loaded these libraries when hovering over a launch icon like some other OS, but that would require desktop integration and is thus a task for GNOME/KDE and the distros.

Anyway is is just a simple install:

sudo apt-get install preload

Enjoy!

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Tuesday, April 8, 2008

Speed up Gnome in Ubuntu: Tip1

By default gnome has an intentional slight delay between selecting a gtk menu and displaying that menu. It's appearently an old tradition in desktops. I personally find it annoying.

First, find the .gtkrc file in your home directory (the file name will most likely have some extra junk on the end e.g. .gtkrc-1.2-gnome2 ). FYI rc generally denotes a script that will run at startup be it system startup, window manager startup, etc. Then, add the following line:

gtk-menu-popup-delay = 0

The changed will take place the next time you log into gnome. This should work in gnome for any distro.

Also you can accomplish this in one line :

echo gtk-menu-popup-delay = 0 >> ~/.gtkrc*

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