Running Ubuntu on low power systems

Added: 19th September 2006

Status: In progress

There is much written on the web about improving the performance of Linux on low power systems. Linux can be made to run on virtually any computer hardware ever made, and most tasks can be sped up to the point where the human is the only part slowing the process down. In this work-in-progress article, I will attempt to give an introduction to making your Ubuntu system fast enough for your needs, through a combination 3 things - simple optimising, using the right tool for the right job, and even cheating.

Optimising

Work in progress

Good advice here: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=189192

Using the right tool for the right job

Work in progress

Cheating

Work in progress

This is my favourite section. A few hacks not normally considered.

Don't speed up your machine - use another machine! No, don't get out of your seat. If you have another machine on your network with more performance, you have a number of options for offloading your work. My favourite is to forward X sessions over SSH. You can use this make programs running on a remote machine appear as if they are running on your local machine. I'm doing this right now - as I sit at a machine equipped with a Celeron 400Mhz processor, I have a window open here, exactly like my other Gnome windows, which started Mozilla Firefox in around 1 second, and happily has 10 tabs open right now, consuming just 2MB of my RAM, and not enough CPU to register on Gnome System Monitor. That's because of the dual processor, dual core Xeon 3.2Ghz with 2Gb RAM on the network which is shouldering the load of my Firefox session. Here is a guide on forwarding X sessions over SSH: http://www.vanemery.com/Linux/XoverSSH/X-over-SSH2.html
A second option is to simply control a remote machine directly from your machine. VNC, RDP and NX allow you to directly control a desktop on the remote machine - you can switch your view to and from this easily, or connect two monitors to allow you to have one view on each machine. Then you can run intensive applications on your remote machine with minimal effort. More on this coming soon.