trimming the fat - update manager

James Wilkinson ubuntu at westexe.demon.co.uk
Sat May 7 09:18:27 UTC 2005


toyfactory wrote:
> As RAM is tight on my laptop (192MB maximum) I want to remove as much
> software I'm sure I don't need as possible.  (But I would like to stick
> to Gnome for the time being).
> 
> For starters as I prefer to manually mark all upgrades in Synaptic once
> a week or so would removing update-manager and update-notifier cause any
> problems?
> 
> Anywhere else I can save memory, can I find out if there are unnecessary
> modules loaded or services started?

I don't think that this will do much for you.

An upgrade -- well, by definition, it's a slightly newer version of a
package that's already installed. On Ubuntu, I understand that any
upgraded packages will just be bugfixes. These won't be much larger than
what's already there, and could save on memory (if they fix memory
leaks).

Besides, programs that just sit on your hard disk don't take up any RAM.

The first thing I'd recommend would be to run
ps -ef | less
in a terminal and look at what is running. The first 20 or so processes
will be init and udev, which you need, and a lot of kernel helper
processes.

Then you'll start getting into the services (which aren't run under your
userID), and X/Gnome (most of which is). It's a good exercise to take a
look at what is running and work out roughly what it does. If you're
puzzled about anything, Google first, then ask.

One other thing: since it's a laptop, it's probably got on-board
graphics which use part of main memory for a frame buffer. Often up to
32 MB of your precious RAM is taken so that 3D games in Windows can run
slightly faster. If you aren't interested in 3D games (under either OS),
you should reduce this to the minimum needed (2.25 MB for 24 bit
graphics at 1024x768, for example). You'd do this in the BIOS.

You might also want to go to 16 bit colour.

Hope this helps,

James.

-- 
E-mail address: james | A woodpigeon would, If a woodpigeon could,
@westexe.demon.co.uk  | But a woodpigeon can't, So it won't.
                      | A woodpigeon could, If a woodpigeon would,
                      | But a woodpigeon doesn't want to. So it doesn't.




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