So you've finally got Slackware to run. Now you're sitting there wondering, "Isn't this thing supposed to be fast?" Well, plenty of people seem to be a little dissapointed with the speed of their computer. There are a lot of thing you can do to kick things up a notch.
You've really got to start by figuring out what you want your computer to do. I like to think of it like a car. If you want a drag racer, you strip it down. Lose the back seat, the air condtioning, the stereo, etc. If you want a do everything SUV, you're just going to have to live with low gas mileage. Same applies here. So let's start seeing \ where we are carrying dead weight.
The first thing we're gonna do is fire up pkgtool. When it comes up, select "Remove". Wow, sure was easy setting up Slackware. Just picked full install and watched it go. Now, you've got a bazillion programs that you never use. Let's start by getting rid of some of them. Now only you can decide what you want to get rid of, but here'ssomething to think about. Do you need nine different window manager, four different web browsers, five email clients, three news readers, etc.? Those are prime candidates for removal. Any foriegn language stuff that you never use? See ya! Are you running a mail server, a web server? Another bunch bites the dust. Now you're probably worried your gonna break something. I know I was. The first thing you gotta do is get a pen and paper handy. Write down all of the packages you remove. Something breaks, re-install the packages. It's easy to install packages with SWareT. Go in bunches of five every few days. In now time, you'll have your system pared down to just the stuff you need
You learned how to recompile a kernel already, didn't you? Well keep hacking away at that thing. Get rid of the stuff you don't need. Always keep a backup config file around in case you break something. I'm always recompiling my kernel. No maybe it's my imagination, but my computer seems more and more responsive all the time
Let's see what you've got going on. Reboot your computer. Now login as root. Run this series of commands to give you an idea where we can speed things up a bit.
nmap localhost >> checkup
ps ax >> checkup
dmesg >> checkup
Now we have a file named checkup that we can use to help us sort through our system. We ran nmap, so now we know what ports we have open. Anything catch you by surprise? Do you know what everything om that report means? Time to hit google. If you've got something running that you don't want running, time to shut it down. You may want to consider removing it completely from your system. We also ran ps ax, which told us all of the programs that were currently running. You need to find out what you can lose and what you want to keep. How did all of these things get started up, anyways? Usually, things get started from one of two places. The first is inetd, which is controlled by /etc/inetd.conf. The other is the startup scripts, which run any executable files in /etc/rc.d/. To get an idea what is what, try editing /etc/inetd.conf. Adding a # in front of a line makes the startup ignore that line. You can comment out just about everything in there if you like. I take a little by little approach to this, just like everything else. Comment out (put a # in front of) a couple of lines, reboot, check things out, repeat. Same goes for the startup script. The command:
chmod -x /etc/rc.d/filename
will keep scripts from running at start time. Keep only what you need, the rest is just weighing you down.
The final thing we ran was dmesg. This tells you all of the startup messages that you received, but
probably didn't have time to read. But how's that gonna speed up your computer? Well, maybe it will and maybe it won't.
Print it out and look the whole thing over. Any error messages? A broke computer tends to be a slow computer.
Is all of your memory reported? If not, time to look into that. You should be learning all kinds of things about your system
as you try to make it faster.
Next thing we are going to look into is hard drive performance. There is a command called hdparm which you can use to optimize your hard disk performance. I have found that leaving my hard drive alone yields the best results, but maybe your system is different. Here's an article to help you see if hdparm can speed up your system.