Bama’s Bunker

The stock install of UNR on my Acer Aspire ZG5 using a 4GB thumb drive was certainly an improvement over the stock XP. I began to wonder what kind of tweaks could be done to make it even better.

In the past I have used ReiserFS to good effect, but it is not included with UNR, so I tried a full install of Ubuntu 9.04 on my 4GB thumb drive using ReiserFS and adding the UNR package after the install. Worked nicely but left me with hardly any room on the thumb drive. A little more reading and I discovered that many of the performance improvements of ReiserFS have been included in ext3, and there are many post-install options for tuning ext3.

So I did a fresh install of UNR with ext3. Afterwards, I did some tuning of the ext3 file system. The ubuntu forums have some good info for ext3fs tuning. Another page with some hints is http://blog.loxal.net/2008/01/tuning-ext3-for-performance-without.html The changes are made in /etc/fstab and /boot/grub/menu.lst

I used the data=journal option rather than the default data=ordered option or the suposedly speediest data=writeback option. I did this because of an interesting note regarding how this mode is the slowest, EXCEPT when data needs to be read from and written to disk at the same time, in which case it outperforms all other modes.

When I considered my main use of the netbook — massive web browsing with Firefox — it seemed to me that most of the time that is exactly what is happening: Firefox is reading from its disk cache while writing to the history database. If you are downloading files while continuing to browse multiple tabs, same thing. While I am no great expert, and I have not tried data=writeback option, it seems as if the data=journal option is working well for my purposes.

While I have not yet taken the plunge of installing UNR with this tuned ext3fs on the internal 8GB SSD in the Acer Aspire ZG5, it seems like the day is coming. The only thing that was holding me back was Skype, and since I have successfully tested Skype for Linux, there are no barriers remaining.

Back in Feb. 2009 I got an Acer Aspire ZG5 on sale at Fry’s. It’s the XP Home version, 8GB SSD, 1G RAM. For minimal usage it did the trick, but as I began to use it more, I chafed at the slow SSD. I found various tricks on the web, like set up a RAM drive and put windows temp files there, along with your Firefox profile. This is quite speedy but has drawbacks, like having to remember to save your profile to the SSD at shutdown, and the plain 32mb RAM drive that’s free from MS makes for a temp folder too small to download and  install some things.

Two utilities in particular helped get away from the sluggishness: CacheManXP optimizes various caches, recovers RAM, and fine tunes a wide range of system settings. Flashfire uses 32mb of  RAM to buffer the SSD, and makes a fantastic improvement to the usability of the netbook. Most noticeable is that I can leave Google Desktop running at all times without noticing any slowdown.

Performance-wise, the stock ZG5 with XP is boggy, kludgy, and sluggish. Running UNR is a great improvement. However, after adding Flashfire, the ZG5 with XP has a slight edge in speed and low latency over UNR.

ubuntu netbook remix is the best linux yet. I’m trying it on an Acer Aspire ZG5 ( 1GB RAM 8GB SSD) using two thumb drives — one for the 1GB UNR image, and and the other to install upon. Windows XP rests undisturbed on the internal SSD, but that may not last long, from the looks of it.

Today I got the 4GB thumbdrive installation all updated, then I made an image of it and cloned it onto the first thumbdrive. Now I have two! The installation leaves about 2G of working space on a 4GB thumb drive. Next to plug one into my desktop machine and see how well that works.