Hi all,

I recently upgraded from dapper to edgy and then on to feisty, and I feel as though things are running slower after booting into the desktop. I have one or two utilities that are starting by default, such as amarok and a battery meter (there is another one already there, making two battery meters). I would like to disable these from startup, as I have limited RAM at the moment, and it seems like it would improve start times at least.

I am running a dell latitude C610 laptop with 128 megs of RAM. I know this is a huge problem, and will soon be getting more RAM. In the meantime, is there a way to change what starts up and what does not, like the msconfig in WinXP?

Speaking of RAM, once I install more memory, is there even a way to change the size of the swap partition, or do I create a new one? This is new for me, so a general comment or two pointing me in the right direction for further research would be great.

Thank you!

You could check if there is a amarok-file/other-files in the ~/.kde/Autostart folder.

I would try looking around in the kcontrol center, or what Dinithion said, You don't need to make your swap parition smaller unless you have a really small harddrive. Also I might suggest running xubuntu, as it uses the xfce desktop and should run faster

If you are surviving on your current swap, with more memory you will be better off.
No need to change anything. What is your (swap) concern ???.

The only reason I asked the question about the swap file is because it has been set at ~300 mb, and if I increase my ram to say, two banks of 512mb, it would seem the swap would be too small. I keep reading that swap should be about 2X your ram.

I intend to upgrade my ram pretty soon, so I don't feel a need to switch to Xubuntu. I can deal with the somewhat slower load speeds until then. I was more concerned about whether I would need to resize the swap file, or add another one.

If it became necessary, I would do a clean install of Gutsy so it could reconfigure the swap. Right now, I am keeping the machine fairly lean for that reason. Nothing much to lose a this point.

I figured that was your concern. Don't worry about it - with more memory, you're less likely to use swap. After you upgrade the distro (bigger/more applications), things might change.
Simple to add swap - Linux will use up to 32 (on x86); no need to have one big one. Lots of tutorials around - Redhat used to have a useful one somewhere on their site.

Thanks, Syg00. I will start looking for tutorials on adding swap. May not need it, but then, best to learn it now when starting over is not too painful if things go haywire.

Looking back at my original post, I realize that I said I had certain programs starting up that I didn't want to preload. I should have been clearer in saying that these are items loading into quicklaunch. It loads 4 quicklaunch icons, and I figured I could live without them, if they really do slow down the load time for the desktop. The .kde/Autostart folder was empty when I looked at it.

I realize now that I can configure the quicklauncher to reduce the number of icons loading there.

The two battery meters in the sys tray seem redundant to me - but one is from the laptop I think - it showed up when I had windows on this box before. The second one came with the upgrades.

Just because you have more memory doesn't mean you need more swap, it actually means that you need less swap, if anything