You'll find different results with HDtune, and probably the other disc benchmarkign software as well.

I've been confused before about what you want, sometimes its 'faster boot', sometimes its 'OS which generally performs well'. If you just installed openbox it would only make a real difference to login manager-> desktop times, not loading times. If oyou'ev got enough CPU/graphics power, there might not be any noticable difference between unity and openbox, once loaded.

Its not just the gnome processes and packages.

Why xubunt-desktop, not minimal install + Xfce4?

Even if your USB flash drive has got similar performance to the internal SSD, its going to be slower. USB uses far more CPU than a HDD/SDD, and you've CPU use is already maxed out for a lot of the boot process.

BTW, there are a few hints as to how to improve boot speed here-

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ReducingDiskFootprint

Comparing apples and oranges there.....

It is a faster boot which I am trying to get, but installing Openbox did not speed up the boot because it already had the other desktop environment., and I would have to get rid of all of the packages.

I chose xubuntu-desktop as I already had a Xubuntu install CD, and I could not find a minimal disk. Did you mean something like ubuntu-core or ubuntu-server?

I took this into consideration and put it on the hard disk to test it. I would test it on my netbook but I only have 20GB of disk space, even though the desktop has over double the processing power so it should have been faster, yet it was still slower.


Thanks for the link, I am going to look at it.


I know it is comparing a faster PC to a slower netbook, but that should push the point more. If Ubuntu on a slower computer boots faster than Xubuntu on a faster PC, that should signal that Ubuntu with my optimisations is faster.

I was actually thinking of the 'alternate install' disc.

Pity that the only guide I can find for how to get Xfce4 installed on top of the alternate install CD is outdated.

3.4GHz dual core... if thats not new, then its a Pentium D (aka '2 P4 cores stuck together on one CPU').

The Pentium Ds have the same problems that the P4s have- long pipeline, and very slow for the MHz rating. The Pentium D probably would be 'faster' for long complicated calculations, but the atom would be faster to react, and be faster for smaller, lighter tasks (like loading an OS).

You cant just compare CPUs on GHz alone. Even if you could, the whole system needs to be taken into account- the old P4 could have a slower HDD and HDD system, slower memory, etc..

Ah, ok. I tried installing Xubuntu on a small partition on the netbook (5GB, I stole some space from /home and /usr) and tried again. This time it beat it at logging in, but Ubuntu still won by 4 seconds on the boot. Oh, and it is the Pentium D. Well done at guessing it.

If you want the minimal install you need the netboot image. It will give you just enough OS to boot to. Text login and cli install what you want on from there.

Make a list before hand.

This is a link all Ubuntu users should have;
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/

The netboot link is for the minimal install.

This link is from the "releases" link on the above linked page.
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/releases/11.04/release/

You can get the alt install disk there.

So if I got the minimal, I could just type in:

sudo apt-get install xfce synaptic (Whatever the thing is for the software centre) freedoom epiphany networkmanager synaptics

Would it come with touchpad things?

As I do not use a touch pad, I have no idea what touch screen things are.

The minimal install gives you the kernel and the dpkg tools and networking (wired). Everything else is up to you. Don't, for instance forget your xserver packages.

Ah, thanks. I think for now I will stick with how it is, I know that way would be faster but I am rather new to linux and as I use my netbook a lot I would not want to mess it up.

I'd try to fix networking after hibernation. You can run any script after hibernation if that's what it takes to make it work.

ureadahead can be disabled, maybe e4rat makes it faster.

Okay, I am going to try and fix it. Slightly later on today (I am going somewhere in 12 minutes) I will try e4rat and see if it is faster than ureadahead.