I’ve also migrated my Acer Aspire One to the new Karmic Koala easy as before using the recommended installation mechanism. One of the things I missed was the SSD specific configuration. This netbook I am using has a very slow SSD drive and I’ve experienced some slowdowns due to the time spent reading and writing the disk. I also wanted to reduce the SSD wear. Here are some steps I have took:

1. Improve Firefox speed by disabling disk cache. Strange enough the disk cache seems to be slower than my internet connection. I just had to go to about:config and set the browser.cache.disk.enable preference to false.

2. Another improvement was to remove logging on the SSD. For this purpose the /var/log and /tmp have to be mounted as temporary filesystems. I am not worried about losing all the logs upon reboot. This is not a server machine. For that just edit /etc/fstab and add the following lines:

tmpfs      /var/log        tmpfs        defaults           0    0
tmpfs      /tmp            tmpfs        defaults           0    0
tmpfs      /var/tmp        tmpfs        defaults           0    0

Don’t forget the trailing line at the end. Note that some programs might complain about the lack of folders so they have to be created. See this blog entry about the dirs to be created by adding them to /etc/rc.local. Note that I did not modified the /etc/init.d/syslogd script as described but just created the dirs and everything worked perfectly.

3. Remove programs from memory. I did not quite felt a slowdown but just for fun I did a ps -ef and tried to remove the applications which where not needed. One place to find some of them was in System -> Startup Applications. Nevertheless nothing seemed as important as the ssh server which I installed right after the system install.

4. Since I use my netbook to read I usually was installing acroread by checking the Canonical apt source but I’ve noticed that evince (aka Document viewer) is much faster so this time I did not even installed acroread.

In conclusion I find this new release quite nice. There is no major change and even the bug which prevented the second flash disk to be seen at runtime exists. As in the previous release I have to reboot after installing the second flash memory card in order to detect it.

Related posts:

1. Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala This ubuntu installation was the bit of fun expected after...
2. Karmic various tricks Logout messages If you are opening a terminal to a...
3. Ubuntu Lucid Lynx There was not much I expected from the new ubuntu...
4. Eclipse crashes in Ubuntu Karmic Trying to run Apache Directory Studio I’ve found that eclupse...
5. Tethered capture with ubuntu and D450 Shooting a photo and the imediately seeing it on a...