It’s no secret: We love Ubuntu. This friendly, easy-to-install Linux distribution has come a long way in a relatively short amount of time, and has challenged a lot of commonly-held misconceptions about FLOSS in general and Linux in particular. No longer is it necessarily difficult to install or maintain an “alternative” OS, nor is it necessary to sacrifice a lot of the gee-whiz graphical beauty of a Vista or a Leopard to get your feet wet in the world of Free Software. In fact, in my own experience some people actually believe the current release of Ubuntu (7.10 “Gutsy Gibbon”) is actually easier to set up and install than Windows XP!

If there’s any problem with the out-of-the-box Ubuntu experience, it’s probably with the GNOME desktop itself, which is the default (unless you chose to install Kubuntu, Xubuntu, or one of the other *buntu offshoots that provide different desktop environments as standard). Although it’s very pretty and far more configurable than, say, the Windows Explorer interface, it won’t win any speed awards… unless you have a fairly beefy system, in fact, you may find it runs much slower than Windows on your machine. (But still probably more stably!)

If you’re one of those who tried Ubuntu but got turned off by how much memory and CPU cycles it was eating up (particularly when one of the traditional “selling points” of Linux is how well it supposedly runs on “older” hardware), here’s a quick and dirty way to gain a small, but very noticeable, speed boost.

1. From the GNOME menu, select System -> Administration -> Synaptic Package Manager.
   
2. Enter your login password when prompted.
3. In the window that opens, click on the “Search” icon, then enter “openbox” in the requester.
   
4. Scroll down and select the “openbox,” “obconf,” and (optionally) “openbox-themes” packages for installation (click on the square in the “S” column in Synaptic).
   
5. When done, click on the “Apply” icon (and confirm) to install the packages.
6. In a terminal window, type “openbox –replace”.

That’s it! You’ve just replaced GNOME’s own, default (and memory-hoggish) window manager, Metacity, with Openbox, a lighter-weight alternative. You should notice your apps running with less of a hit in system performance now.

The only thing is, you can no longer control your window settings through GNOME itself; you must use the obconf program for that. The good news is, obconf is a pretty simple tool that’s easy to grasp, and if you installed the openbox-themes package you’ll get a nice selection of titlebar themes to play with.

Granted, this isn’t much of a speed increase – at least, not as much as going with a lighter-weight desktop (such as Xfce) or simply running Openbox by itself. But if you’ve grown accustomed to GNOME, this lets you keep the environment you’re familiar with while still giving you a performance boost. Not a bad compromise at that, if you ask me…

If you liked that, try...

1. Ubuntu 7.10 Is Here
2. Ubuntu 6.10 Final Released
3. Linux Tip: ‘Embedded’ Terminal On Your Desktop
4. Watsa Matta with Ubuntu?
5. Review of Ubuntu 7.10

2 Comments »

1. 
   Migo
   February 5, 2008 at 1:41 am

   I may have to switch to Openbox myself soon. The latest version of Gnome doesn’t seem to play well with GIMP and a few other programs I’ve got and I’m not much of a KDE fan. It’s pretty and all, but holy crap the shiny burns my retinas! Nor will I be going to fluxbox or anything that requires me to completely rebuild my menus from scratch. That’s just me, I’m incredibly lazy like that.

   Good tip though, one I’ll most likely be picking up myself soon.

   [Reply]

   Devin de Gruyl Reply:
   February 5th, 2008 at 11:58 am

   I know what you mean about “the shiny”; it’s pretty to look at for a while, but sooner or later my eyes just get tired of it. There are times when I think the original Mac, NeXTSTEP, and OS/2 2.x desktops had the right idea… neutral, even boring, colors and widgets for the base OS, thus pretty much forcing your eyes to focus on the work at hand rather than a whole bunch of pocketfluff and eye candy. As someone who deals with ADD, I can certainly appreciate the desire for a GUI with less in the way of visual distractions.

   I’ve been looking for a GTK+ 2 theme that faithfully emulates the original Motif widgets, or something along those lines, for precisely this reason. Any ideas?

   [Reply]

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