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Saturday, July 3, 2010

Enabling prelink in Ubuntu Lucid like Fedora

Fedora is one of the most advanced operating system, which never fails to awe each and every day. I always have wondered how Fedora manages to be so much snappier than Ubuntu. Here may be one of the reasons, it has prelink enabled by default.

Here I try to explain how to get prelink running in Ubuntu for your reading pleasure

Here is a screenshot showing, Fedora 13 has prelink installed and enabled by default, whereas, Ubuntu Lucid 10.04 has not installed prelink by default



prelink is a utility which modifies shared libraries to relocate faster or in end user's terms, launch applications faster

To enable prelink in ubuntu, we have to install it first

sudo aptitude install prelink


Before running prelink first time, we need to modify its config file to enable prelink on all libraries

To do that, the following editor command will help (if you dont want to undergo the pain of opening a file and editing it)

sudo sed -i s/PRELINKING\=unknown/PRELINKING\=yes/g /etc/default/prelink


To do prelinking on all libraries for the first time, run prelink from cron as follows

sudo /etc/cron.daily/prelink


Now reboot your Ubuntu box, your applications should launch faster like Fedora

5 comments:

  1. after the last command it says "command not found"

    ReplyDelete
  2. No improvements at all for me, running Linux Mint 10. Measurements done by hand using package 'stopwatch'

    Time are Before prelink / After prelink

    Mem use: 1117592k 1104600k

    Chrome----------- 000:00:09.911 000:00:10.087
    Firefox Minefield 000:00:06.828 000:00:07.889
    Openoffice Writer 000:00:10.130 000:00:10.583
    Thunderbird------ 000:00:14.627 000:00:15.089
    Gimp------------- 000:00:08.004 000:00:07.985
    Inkscape--------- 000:00:18.958 000:00:18.375
    VirtualBox------- 000:00:07.746 000:00:07.239
    Skype------------ 000:00:05.596 000:00:05.334

    ReplyDelete
  3. This is why I mentioned "Here may be one of the reasons, it has prelink enabled by default."

    It may work, not so sure as Mint 10 is by itself very optimized and based on 10.10. I observed that Ubuntu 10.10 is as fast as Arch and never bother to undergo pain of configuring everything the Arch way

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