How to Make Fedora Run Faster on Your PC or Mac

With financial backing from Red Hat and strong support from a community of users and developers, Fedora is one of the more popular operating systems based on the Linux kernel. But it is widely acknowledged to be one of the slowest as well, taking longer to boot than many others. This is going to improve your gaming experience on your PC and you will be able to explore gaming websites like Poker 88 more efficiently. 

While some people report that it boots faster than Microsoft Windows XP, this is probably due to the fact that Windows XP accumulates clutter in the form of registry entries and hard drive fragmentation … the upshot being that the longer it’s installed on your PC, the slower it gets. Many experienced users reinstall Windows XP every year or so, for this reason. Fedora does not have this problem, and so over time, it performs better relative to Windows XP (to say nothing of Windows Vista). Out of the box, however, a basic Windows XP install will completely trounce Fedora in terms of boot time.

This guide will explain how to make your Fedora installation boot up faster. Not only that, but there is also a trick you can use that may r

educe hard disk access times by as much as 10-20%. Read on and find out how!

Turn off Unnecessary Services

“Services” are what background processes are called, like the part of the operating system that’s loaded in order to recognize Bluetooth-enabled wireless devices. You don’t have to click on them or run a command to load them up; they just load automatically.

Default installations of most Linux-based operating systems load up a bunch of different services in order to provide a good out-of-the-box experience and cover as many situations as possible. But loading up all these background processes takes time, and slows down your PC or Mac’s bootup sequence. If you know which ones you don’t need, you can tell it not to load them up.

Extremely good tutorials are available for how to customize Fedora services, one of which is recent as of Fedora 9 and is available here: http://www.mjmwired.net/resources/mjm-services-f9.html Other tutorials are available on this website about how to optimize your Fedora install, and it is highly recommended.

Turn on Noatime

This is the biggie. By default, Fedora and other Linux-based operating systems make a note of the last time each file was accessed, every time you load anything. The problem is, this basically means that for anything you do on your PC or Mac, it has to keep pausing to update these notes on everything. And that slows your machine down, especially on notebooks or small-form-factor computers (like the Mac Mini) which have slower hard drives.

According to the Kernel developers, making this one change will speed up your system tremendously. So how do you do it? Unlike modifying the services, which you can do through the default Gnome menu (System – Administration – Services), this one you’ve got to do via the command line. It’s not too hard, though, and this link will explain how to do it: http://www.fedoraguide.info/index.php?title=Main_Page#Noatime This site is also a great resource for the new Fedora user, and has a number of tweaks and suggestions as well as some troubleshooting guides.

The Upshot

Fedora is very slow by default. But as these guides show, that can be changed, and it’s not very hard to do, either. Take some time to browse through the guides linked to from this article, and you’ll be one step closer to making your Fedora install into the best computing experience you’ve ever had. Good luck, and have fun!