The Fast and Complete Ubuntu system
Feb 13th 2009adminUncategorized
I wanted to share with anyone who cares to read this, the steps I went through to setup a REALLY fast and very practical (hence COMPLETE) Ubuntu system. (As well, it is a document I can reuse, and possibly improve upon, when loading another computer in the future to help me remember all of those little tweaks and useful applications I chose to add to the base install.
I will try yo make this brief, concise, short…all right..moving along….
1) Install the O/S
When you order your computer, you may be tempted to go for a single really large hard drive.. “Whoo-hoo!!” you say, those 1TB and 2TB drives are finally starting to become nice and affordable.. well WAIT! For possibly the same amount of money, or even less, you can get four, or better yet six, 500GB drives and set them up in a RAID array. Here is what I did (not to say this will make the most sense for everyone).
I bought 5 x 500GB HD’s and set them up in the following fashion (I plan on getting another to make this an even 6, not sure why I didn’t to begin with…):
/dev/sda1 * 1 60 481918+ 83 Linux (used for the /boot mountpoint)
/dev/sda2 61 250 1526175 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda3 251 1500 10040625 fd Linux raid autodetect
/dev/sda4 1501 60801 476335282+ 83 Linux
/dev/sdb1 1 250 2008093+ 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sdb2 251 1500 10040625 fd Linux raid autodetect
/dev/sdb3 1501 60801 476335282+ fd Linux raid autodetect
/dev/sdc1 1 250 2008093+ 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sdc2 251 1500 10040625 fd Linux raid autodetect
/dev/sdc3 1501 60801 476335282+ fd Linux raid autodetect
/dev/sdd1 1 250 2008093+ 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sdd2 251 1500 10040625 fd Linux raid autodetect
/dev/sdd3 1501 60801 476335282+ fd Linux raid autodetect
/dev/sde1 1 250 2008093+ 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sde2 251 1500 10040625 fd Linux raid autodetect
/dev/sde3 1501 60801 476335282+ fd Linux raid autodetect
I allowed a small piece of each drive to act as a swap drive.
sda3, sdb2, sdc2, sdd2, and sde2 are all setup using mdadm in a RAID 0 (striped). I set this as my “” mount point and install everything except my “\home” mount point here. There is a great tutorial on how2forge that explains how to boot off of a single drive, install onto a RAID set and effectively get the SPEED from the raid to run your system.
How to install Ubuntu to run off of RAID directly
The remainder sdb3, sdc3, sdd3 and sde3 are setup in a RAID 10 and mounted to “/home”. When I get my sixth drive I plan on expanding to use sda4 and a similar portion of the 6th drive.
Why, you may ask would you want to do this? The speed you get from a RAID 0 stripe across 5 drives is PHENOMENAL!!! Plus having your data saved in a RAID 10 gives you the piece of mind of redundancy and significant speed over RAID 5, 6 or just a simple RAID 1. I actually spent the time to test all of the different configurations with a great little tool called bonnie++. I apologise, but I accidentally deleted the results for all of the configurations. My bad… just believe me when I tell you, having many smaller drives in a RAID 0, is MUCH faster than a couple large drives.
2) Enable the Restricted Video drivers.
I have not really had a whole lock of luck with ATI graphic cards and Linux, so over the last five or six PCs I have built, I have come to the conclusion I will never use anything again but NVidia graphics cards. To that end the first thing after the very FAST reboot I do is enable the restricted NVidia drivers to get the most out of my dual displays.
3) Remove unneeded software then update your system.
This cuts the time for the updates down quite a bit. You should also consider running through the list of mirrors and pinging them to figure out the fastest 3 servers for you. Downloading at 20KB versus 600KB is a BIG difference.
4) Install the restricted extras to be able to view flash, java applications, listen to MP3s, etc..
5) Other packages to install
apt-get install preload
apt-get install ubuntu-restricted-extras
apt-get install portmap nfs-kernel-server
6) Other tweaks
Open up writer, and go to Tools > Options. Go to memory in the sidebar.
Set number of undo steps to 30-40 max, have it use 64MB or more (128, if your system can afford it (at least 512mb total ram) helps greatly), boost memory per object to 5.0 MB.
Something I did not do, but for consideration:
CFQ by Default
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