Tweaking Topics
Basically my operating system never looks the same for more than 2 weeks at a time. At most… I love to tweak every aspect of the system to improve performance, productivity and just the general look and feel. Because of this I almost never get tired of using the system. If you feel the same way to some degree then Ubuntu is a really fun system to use.
In Ubuntu you can easily tweak all sorts of things just from the system and its default applications. I’m sure you’ve already changed your theme, background, fonts and such. But there’s a lot more to do. In this post I won’t really go into depth with these topics but just try and give you a few possibilities for things to look at. Later I might write some detailed guides about some nice system tweaking.
Here’s a list of some applications and such that I’ve found really nice. This list consists mainly of things related to system and performance tweaking.
Ubuntu Tweak
This little sweetheart is a great utility for tweaking some of the more or less hidden features of Ubuntu. The program is constantly being improved and new versions are released once in a while. Another great feature is that the program can easily clean up packages for you. Removing cached packages, configuration leftovers and old kernels no longer in use.
Ubuntu Tweak can be downloaded from the internet or you can add a PPA to your sources list to make sure that the program is always up to date. Everything you need to know can be found here:
http://ubuntu-tweak.com/
Preload
Preload is a utility that tries to predict what programs you are about to use. It will then load parts of the programs into memory to decrease the startup time for applications. It’s pretty nice and needs no configuration what so ever. It’s in the repositories and can be installed (and started) using this command:
sudo apt-get install preload
BleachBit
If you come from Windows you might know about the application called CCleaner. A really nice utility for cleaning up various parts of the computer. BleachBit is quite similar and can easily be installed in Ubuntu. Like Preload it’s in the repositories so installing is very easy. Running this program once in a while will take care of cleaning up after the system and various applications.
Deborphan and localepurge
A few extra applications that can help you remove unnecessary data from your computer. Deborphan can find packages that are no longer in use so you can get rid of them. Be careful though as it might think a package is unused although it’s actually just needed by an application you got from another source than the repos.
Localepurge automatically removes small pieces of data left behind when installing packages and such. It will clean up a bit even if you never call the program explicitly.
And there you go. A few programs that can be used to keep your computer running smoothly. As I said I might go into some more in depth tweaking later on and I might make a similar list for some nice visual tweaks and eyecandy and such at a later time. Feel free to check back once in a while.
Sigurd out…
