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I’ve been messing around, tweaking and poking my system in an attempt to optimise, and speed things up a little. Installing 2Gb RAM has helped, but I’ve also been playing trying to speed up my laptop’s boot time. I stumbled across a cool little application, called bootchart:

“boot sequence auditing and chart generator
bootchart allows you to audit the boot sequence of your computer and
generate a pretty chart of the processes run, including how long they
took and how much CPU and I/O they used.

The auditing is performed by adding a script to the top of your initramfs
which lives inside is own tiny filesystem during the boot process and
monitors the rest of the system booting”

(description from the Synaptic Package Manager)

So, I installed bootchart

sudo apt-get install bootchart

and rebooted to benchmark the boot time - 44 seconds (bootchart creates a cool png image in /var/log/bootchart each time the computer boots up). Not bad, but surely it could be a little better, right?

Aside from the obvious optimisation tricks of turning off unnecessary services, I’d also heard about readahead, which can be used to cache files to be loaded at boot time. To enable it, all I had to do was create a boot profile, which can be done via Grub at boot time. So, I rebooted again, and when the Grub boot list appeared, created the profile:

First, I highlighted the default boot option - actually it was already highlighted, since it’s what I usually boot into! - and pressed the “e” key. Then I scrolled down to the “kernel” line, and pressed “e” once again, which allows a temporary edit of the Grub boot command line. Moving the cursor to the end of the line, I added ” profile” (notice the space character before the word profile), pressed “Enter”, and booted. It took longer than usual, obviously, since readahead was creating the profile to, well, read ahead on the next, and all subsequent boots.

After my system had fully booted into Gnome, I rebooted, waited, then checked the bootchart log again. 42 seconds…

Oh well - a couple of seconds improvement is better than nothing! Back to the drawing board…

written by Hodge \\ tags: boot, bootchart, optimise, profile, readahead, Ubuntu

(1 votes, average: 5 out of 5)

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When I first installed Ubuntu, I had a minor problem - well, more of an irritation - whereby the boot up splash screen was blank. The OS booted no problem, but the geek in me likes to see feedback on what’s happening when the OS is booting!

Usplash is the application that controls the boot splash, so I did a quick search in /etc for a conf file. Oddly enough, one exists, and it’s called usplash.conf . Running
more /etc/usplash.conf
revealed that the screen resolution was set to 1024 x 768 - my laptop is “widescreen”, and thus 1280 x 800. A simple one to figure out! I ran
gksu gedit /etc/usplash.conf
and changed the settings as follows:
# Usplash configuration file
xres=1280
yres=800

I also edited the menu.lst file, in /boot/grub/

gksu gedit /boot/grub/menu.lst

and changed the end of the “kernel” line for the default Linux image boot, removing “quiet”, and ensuring “splash” was also included:

title Ubuntu 7.10, kernel 2.6.22-14-generic
root (hd0,6)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.22-14-generic root=UUID=[Your UUID] ro splash
initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.22-14-generic


Saved, rebooted, and voila! The geek was satisfied, and lots of shiny orange text informed me of funky background stuff!

Additionally, I downloaded, via the Synaptec Package Manager, some extra usplash screens. The following command allows you to change the splash screen (changing usplash-theme-ubuntu.so to whatever you want to install - Synaptic will install theme packs into /usr/lib/usplash)

sudo update-alternatives --set usplash-artwork.so /usr/lib/usplash/usplash-theme-ubuntu.so
update-initramfs -k $(uname -r) -u

There’s also a great HowTo available in the Ubuntu Community Documentation on how to create your own Usplash screens: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/USplashCustomizationHowto

Update, 24/02/08:

I downloaded and installed usplash-switcher today
sudo apt-get install usplash-switcher
however, when I try to run it, it returns “Segmentation fault (core dumped)”, and both /var/log/messages and /var/log/syslog contain “kernel: [ 7909.401911] usplash-switche[14217]: segfault at 0000000000000010 rip 00002ad106c67058 rsp 00007fffa9ea5f30 error 4″.

I’m looking further into this one, but until I find a solution, the command line will suffice for changing themes

Update, 20/04/08: I meant to add this a long time ago, but just haven’t had the chance. Anyway, Usplash Themes can now (well, for a long time already) be managed with StartUp-Manager, which can be installed either with Synaptic (search for startupmanager) or by the following:

sudo apt-get install startupmanager

Once installed, it can be accessed via System-> Administration -> StartUp-Manager. The Usplash Themes, along with myriad other options, can be configured in the “Appearence” section.

written by Hodge \\ tags: boot, boot screen, boot up, Ubuntu, usplash