Improving boot performance of Ubuntu Hardy Heron

After the Hardy release the boot time had increased to more than 1 min.

First I followed the Howto available at Ubuntu Forums. But this how to was created for Edgy and I had Hardy

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=89491

Using sysv-rc-conf altered the following.

Could not find following processes that were mentioned in the HowTo
alsa, apmd, gdomap, gpm, hdparam, hotplug and hotplug-net, hplip, ifrename, ifupdown, ifupdonw-clean, inetd, inet.real, lvm, portmap, readahead, ssh,

These were the new processes that had come after edgy
apport, atieventsd, avahi-daemon, dhcbd, hal, keyboard-setup, libpam-fo, loopback, mysql-ndb,mysql, ploicykit, powernowd, procps, rc.local, rmnlogin, rsync, vbesave

Stopped loading following based on the explaination provided in the Howto - atd, bluetooth,cupsys, dns-clean, pppd-dns
Left hotkey-setup, usplash as it is.
This changed hardly made a difference of couple of seonds. But later realized usplash was contributing to the delay and this posts suggests not to select it in the cofig.

I could not find the Boot Up manager mentioned at

http://www.zolved.com/synapse/view_content/28311/Tune_Boot-Up-Manager_for_better_performance_of_Ubuntu

Thanks to the post at

Making Ubuntu boot in 19 seconds

I found bootchart. To install bootchart run

sudo apt-get install bootchart

Bootchart creates png image of boot activities at /var/logs/bootchart From bootchart I found that usplash was using CPU during the Boot. More the CPU taken up the process the bar will have darker shade of the blue.

Fixed the issue as per the thread

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=285920&page=3

Edit usplash.conf and set resolution to 1024x768. Though actual resolution of my screen is 1280x800 that makes splash and text move to the left.

sudo gedit /etc/usplash.conf

Once this is set reconfigure the usplash package or run the below command to update the theme. You can notice the additional parameter vga=773 in /boot/grub/menu.lst after you have run this.

sudo update-usplash-theme usplash-theme-ubuntu

After this boot time was reduced to 32 seconds and my splash screen also started working. Earlier I used to get a blank screen during boot and I was thinking thats how it works!

There is a startup-manager available to handle manage Grub configuration.

Japanese Learning tools on Ubuntu

I am finding these 2 tools very useful in learning Japanese.

Kanatest helps you to sharpen Hiragana and Katakana including the mixed kana. Randomly a letter is shown and user has to give the romaji equivalent of the symbol. One can also track the progress by the history of tests which contains time taken and percentage of correct answers. For installaing it run

sudo apt-get install kanatest

Langdrill has similar features and also contains vocabulary lessons. Apart from Japanese it contains drills for French and Swedish. For installing

sudo apt-get install langdrill

For more tools visit mbrass

Ubuntu upgrade from 71.0 to 8.04 Hardy Heron

I carried out the upgrade from Systems -> Adminsitration -> Update Manager as per the Instructionns at Upgrading to Ubuntu 8.04 LTS
Remember to update current version before installing 8.04.
Current installation updates were 300 MB and 8.04 installation changes were 800 MB. First problem I faced during installation was hang during generating locale.

Generating locales... en_AU.UTF-8...

There are different solutions for this issue. Refer to [ubuntu] Hardy 8.04 update freezes on generating locales - Ubuntu Forums
What worked for me is, starting in recovery mode with 7.10 default kernel 2.6.22.15 , select the option open up shell as root and then run

dpkg --configure -a

And then whenever generating locales comes up kill the localegen processes using kill -9 After these installation used to abort with following error

dpkg: too many errors, stopping dpkg: ../../src/packages.c:251: process_queue: Assertion `!queuelen' failed.

I repeated running dpkg after rebooting in 8.04 default kernel. This time locale generation worked fine but there were lot of errors with gnome configuration due to which dpkg aborted.
Next I logged in using failsafe mode in 8.04 default kernel. One can switch to failsafe mode by clicking on options available at left hand corner bottom on the login screen. Then select sessions option and popup will come up with session options. Select failsafe GNOME session. After logging in again run above dpkg comman in a terminal.

sudo dpkg --configure -a

After this rebooted the machine and it looked like things have fallen to place.

First impressions - Its hardly couple of hours since I started using Hardy Heron

• Looks like wireless support has improved a lot. I could see the available networks from network icon on right hand side corner without any configuration! That was not there before.
• Default background looks good and fits the release theme.
• Looks like firfox 3.0.1 has issue with address text box ... It does not get updated and does not take whatever typed in . Only way I can visit the sites is through the bookmarks !
• Not sure if there was a crash reporting facility earlier ...
• Brasero does the disc burning.
• Boot takes more time than 7.10

Update Aug 3rd
If you are on a AMD 64 machine fixing flash player follow the instructions at
Flash 9 install script for AMD64 (nspluginwrapper)
For the last instruction, creating the link in plugins directory of firefox make sure you are using directory name based on ur release of firefox. (such as firefox-3.0.1

Correction - firefox 3.0.1 address text box might have occured as I was in the middle of plugin installation. It seems to be working fine now.

Setting up Ruby on Rails on Ubuntu 7.1 Gutsy

For setting up ruby, rails and mysql used the following link.
Rails on Ubuntu
Note that the rails version installed will be 2.0.2. If you are using 1.x version you will have to make changes to the code. That's what I will be doing next. I was using 1.2.x that came with Instant Rails on Windows
Openssl lib
I had to install libopenssl-ruby. Instructions are provided in the above link, otherwise when you start the web server it will through error and come out.
Mongrel
By default Webrick comes with rails. Mongrel can be installed using
sudo gem install mongrel -y
Once mongrel is installed it becomes the default webserver.
Netbeans IDE
After reading through couple of blogs I choose netbeans(6.1 beta) as the IDE. At work I use My Eclipse and it used to take considerable amount of memory. A month back I tried netbeans on a 700 MHz 512 MB laptop and I felt it consumes less resources. Base install of Netbeans is a 24 MB download. I downloaded JavaSE base and included Ruby using updater. I had to install packages sun-java6-bin, sun-java6-jdk before I could install Netbeans.
Installing Rmagick.
Ramgick requires ImageMagick 6.3.0 or higher. So I had to download source for ImageMagick 6.3.2 and build it before I can install rmagick. Followed the instructions provided at Setting up rmagick on Ubuntu

Ubuntu installation on Dell Vostro 1000

System Info : AMD Athlon 64 X2 Duo Core, ATI Radeon XPress 1150

Pre-Work
Burnt the CD and checked using the instructions provided at

1. Burning CD Provides instruction to download the iso and burning it using recommended software
2. Checking the CD Checking the CD using MD5 check sum
3. Note down IP Adress, Subnet mask, Default gateway, Preffered DNS Server.

Partitioning
There is good amount of information available at Partitioning Windows and Ubuntu.

But I choose to shrink the Windows partition and selected use the free space option provided by Ubuntu installer.

Setting up internet connection.
I have DSL cable modem(ADSL) connected using ethernet cable. Followed the instructions at Ubuntu forums ADSLPPPoE Make sure that all the lights on the modem are on before you run the pppoeconf. Once this is done check if repositories are enabled in /etc/apt/sources.list otherwise you may not be able to install packages using apt-get.

Enabling restricted drivers.
ATI drivers provide better visual effect than the driver that is supplied with Ubuntu installation. These drivers can be enabled using restricted driver manager from System -> Administration. For detailed steps and alternative ways of doing it refer to Ubuntu Gutsy Installation Guide
Update Apr 13 2008
Installing flash 9 for AMD 64
There is script created by Kilz and usage is explained in the sticky Nspluginwrapper Install Script for Dapper-Gutsy(Updated 3/8/08 )
I came across ia32lib problem and followed the instructions in the post flash 9 install AMD 64