5 Tips to Improve your Linux Desktop
Here are 5 funkalicious tips to improve your Linux desktop.
Whether it be speed, or just look and feel, here are some of my favourites. (All these tips were written and fully work on a Ubuntu and Debian based systems, but theres no reason why they wont work on any other Linux distribution, obviously there will be various things you will need to do differently on non-debian based systems, package management being one).
Please remember to back your data up before attempting any of these as we cant be responsible for any damages. All these tips require using the big scary terminal, but only very minimal knowledge of it and the ability to follow instructions.
1. Terminal Greeting – Look and Feel
For our first tweak, we will be using a program called Figlet to create a nice little welcome message when you start your terminal. Here’s how to do it.
Simply Install Figlet from Synaptic or by sudo apt-get install figlet next type the following line into terminal:
gedit .bashrc
Obviously, replacing “username” by your username. Next scroll down to the very bottom of the file and add this line:
figlet “Uberl33t”;echo -n ‘With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility’; echo
Finally, save the file, exit terminal and open a new terminal and you should see something special.
2. Minimal Swapping – Speed
This is a very well known trick, but one of my favourites. We all know RAM is faster then your Swap Disk/Page File. By default, Ubuntu sets its “swappiness” to 60. But if you have over half a gigabyte of RAM you might consider changing that so your ram gets used more, thus speeding up your system. (Swappiness uses a value between 0 and 100 to determine how often it uses its swap disk over RAM, a lower number therefore uses ram more often). Here’s how to do it:
Simply open a terminal and type
sudo gedit /etc/sysctl.conf
Then, scroll down to the bottom of the page where it says vm.swappiness=60 and change that number (60) to something lower. I have mine set at 10 which works great for me. Sweet As!
3. Fix Long Boot Time – Speed
If you’re experiencing long boot times with a blank screen, here’s a simple tweak that should help.
Open a terminal and type:
sudo gedit /etc/usplash.conf
You will see 2 variables there, (for me by default, they were 1024 and 768). Change those variables to your monitors native resolution (For me its 1440×900 so I obviously changed the variables to 1440 and 900). Save the file and exit. Finally, in terminal type the following:
sudo dpkg-reconfigure usplash
4. Insta-Menus! – Look and Feel
Sometimes it takes a bit for the Gnome Menus to appear, with a very simple, single line of code we can change that for good. Heres How!
Simple open any text editor (gedit will do fine) and paste the following line into it:
gtk-menu-popup-delay = 0″| tee -a .gtkrc-2.0
Then, save the file in your home directory with the exact name .gtkrc-2.0
Quit Gedit and Restart your session! Your menus should appear faster.
5. Instant Compression – Usability
If you’ve ever needed a quick way to compress/uncompress a file instantly these scripts are for you. These scripts are the gscripts for compression presented a little neater in the menus.
cd ~/.gnome2/nautilus-scripts
wget http://hostfile.org/nautilusscriptstar.gz
tar zxvf nautilusscriptstar.gz
So! There you have it! 5 Simple yet awesome tips and tweaks to über up your Linux desktop.
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March 23rd, 2008 at 5:50 pm
Shouldn’t you just configure a terminal greeting through your .bashrc?
March 23rd, 2008 at 6:26 pm
OK, restarting “X” is hardly rebooting your system.
March 23rd, 2008 at 8:31 pm
There is no ‘swappiness’ field in Kubuntu 7.10′s /etc/sysctl.conf file, by default. I think this is the line to add (at the end is fine):
vm.swappiness=10
March 24th, 2008 at 12:06 am
WTF names their program Figlet! xD
lefty.crupps; I’d suggest just adding vm.swappiness=10 to the bottom of the file, where it is in Ubuntu.
March 24th, 2008 at 12:16 am
Ah, nice find Andrew.
March 26th, 2008 at 2:55 am
Good article.
You have an extra quote mark at the end of the directive to add figlet to .bashrc. Not hard to figure out, but you might want to correct it.
Don
March 26th, 2008 at 5:19 am
Fixed, thanks Don.
March 26th, 2008 at 5:47 am
Would be nice if you tell us, why and how the commands work… so one knows what one is actually doing.
March 27th, 2008 at 6:24 am
Thanks for those – always pleased to find more speed, and that black screen boot was puzzling me on a widescreen Toshiba notebook.
“Weather it be speed, or just look and feel”
Minor nit, and completely unrelated to the tips, but it’s ‘whether’, not ‘weather’
March 27th, 2008 at 7:22 am
Okay I am not a Ubuntu user (running a mixture of Debian Sid and Solaris here) so things might differ but the sudo in “sudo gedit /home/username/.bashrc” is unneccessary. Since the file belongs to the user they do not need to acquire root powers to edit it.
This is an error I see a lot on Ubuntu sites.
March 27th, 2008 at 7:52 am
Another couple nit-picky things, ’cause y’know, that’s how we are:
When carrying out a graphical command as super user, it is in good practice to use gksudo instead of sudo. Though as gm states, this file has write access by the user already, so it doesn’t technically need either.
Also, in your opening paragraph it might be a good idea to clarify that these tweaks are on a Debian based system and other distros should use their own package managers and consult their local bearded penguins for any file location discrepancies.
Other than that, great article, I really enjoyed it
March 27th, 2008 at 8:11 am
not a graphical improvement.
gtk-menu-popup-delay = 0?| tee -a .gtkrc-2.0
is just like a MenuShowDelay on windows os.
March 27th, 2008 at 8:17 am
another nitpick to add to that already pointed out
(running graphical apps as sudo should be done with “gksudo”, and you don’t need to be super-user to edit files in your home folder)
you don’t need to say /home/ as the same thing is expressed with the ~ key.
so instead of saying
“edit your /home/username/.bashrc file where username is your username”
you just need to say
“edit your ~/.bashrc file”
other than that, I didn’t know about figlet, what a wicked little app
March 27th, 2008 at 11:05 am
Thanks for all the comments! Keep ‘em coming.
March 28th, 2008 at 9:11 am
The title of this article should be “5 ways to improve your ubuntu desktop”
April 5th, 2008 at 1:05 am
Uh, Pizza. There’s much more to Linux then just Ubuntu. These tips work on LINUX not Ubuntu, and as Ubuntu is Linux they therefore work on Ubuntu too.
I’m not bashing Ubuntu (I personally use Ubuntu too) but I dislike when people think Linux is just Ubuntu and Ubuntu is just Linux.
August 22nd, 2008 at 12:47 pm
An easier way to test swappiness values is to use sudo -i to get root permissions, and then execute:
echo “10″ > /proc/sys/vm/swappiness
This way you don’t have to restart the machine. Use this value for a while, changing it if you are not satisfied, then create/write it in /etc/sysctl.conf
April 5th, 2009 at 12:03 pm
[...] Statistics (April 2009) [...]
December 26th, 2009 at 2:59 pm
Hi..
Change the fidget line into this:
_____________________________
figlet “##your name##”;
fortune
_____________________________
Much more funny