nixCraft Linux Sys Admin Blog

Preload: How To Speed Up Your Linux Application Loading Time

Posted: 28 Feb 2008 10:05 AM CST

preload is a free Linux. It runs in background and records statistics about usage of more frequently-used programs. These programs are loaded into a Linux memory. Thus results is faster application startup times. From the project home page:

preload is an adaptive readahead daemon. It monitors applications that users run, and by analyzing this data, predicts what applications users might run, and fetches those binaries and their dependencies into memory for faster startup times.

(Fig. 01: preload in action - saving time while loading Linux apps)

There is a nice tutorial published by Techthrob about installing and configuring Techthrob under Debian / Ubuntu Linux systems.

=> Drastically Speed up your Linux System with Preload

How To Make Slick Linux Desktop / Eye Candy Effects

Posted: 28 Feb 2008 09:54 AM CST

This guide offer 10 cool Linux desktops and how to make them; from the guide:

So you thought Vista’s desktop looked slick? Or the latest Leopard desktop is coolest thing after sliced bread? Well you probably haven’t been properly exposed to Linuxâ€™s customizability. Linux is so flexibility is one of itâ€™s strongest selling points. With Linux you can easily even mimic Vista or Leopard totally free! Now I will take you through some of the coolest, freshest, fastest desktops I have come across.

(Fig. 01: Agent Smith Meet KDE Effect)

=> 10 Slick Linux Desktops, and How To Make Them

Download of the day: FreeBSD 7.0 ISO / CD Image

Posted: 28 Feb 2008 12:58 AM CST

FreeBSD 7.0 stable has been released and available for download. FreeBSD is back to its incredible performance. According to some benchmarks on both Intel and AMD 64 bit systems FreeBSD 7.0 being faster than Linux 2.6 when running PostreSQL or MySQL. It has experimental support for Sun’s ZFS filesystem. gjournal can be used to set up journaled filesystems, gvirstor can be used as a virtualized storage provider. Please see complete release note including upgrade instructions here. There is also interview published with FreeBSD developers