How to Make Firefox Faster on Linux Mint

Before making any changes, please make a backup of .mozilla/firefox/--------.default/prefs.js for your own safety. prefs.js is a file that stores all of your history and bookmarks from Firefox. 

•  First open Firefox. 

• Type "about:config" (without quotes) in the Firefox address bar and then click "Enter". This command opens a configuration page that allows the user to change advanced system settings in Firefox.

• Speed up page loading/rendering time in Firefox. Right-click anywhere in the "about:config" window, click on "New" and then select "String". Name the string "nglayout.initialpaint.delay" (without quotes). Enter a value of "0" and then click "OK". This tweak decreases the amount of time Firefox waits to render a page from 250 milliseconds to zero. Make the same process and name the string "content.notify.interval" and enter a value of "0".

• Force Firefox to release reserved system RAM when the browser is minimized. Right-click anywhere in the "about:config" window, click on "New" and then select "Boolean". Name the entry "config.trim_on_minimize" (without quotes). Change the value to "True" and then click "OK". This setting forces Firefox to only reserve about 10 MB of system memory while minimized.

• Normally Firefox only sends one or two tunnels to the website. However, the more tunnels you use the faster you go. To change this, type in filter bar "network.http.pipelining.maxrequests" and change the value to "150".

• Attention: The more tunnels you use, the more bandwidth you use, meaning you could use as tunnels as you want but that would probably kill the sites bandwidth if everyone did that. 150 is a very good value.

• Type "network.http.pipelining" in filter bar, and set it to "True" by double clicking it.

• Type "network.http.proxy.pipelining" in filter bar, and set it to "True" by double clicking it.

Monitor System Resources in Ubuntu 12.04 LTS

This tutorial shows how to monitor your Ubuntu system resources such as usage of processor, memory, network, hard disk and also cpu/motherboard temperature, cpu fan speed.
There’s a good system load indicator for Ubuntu monitoring cpu usage, cache, memory, network, etc. And psensor is a gtk+ application monitoring temperatures and fan speeds.

1. Install system load indicator

Open up a terminal (Ctrl+Alt+T) and install it from ppa:indicator-multiload/stable-daily. You can use graphical way adding ppa

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:indicator-multiload/stable-daily
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install indicator-multiload

 
2. Install psensor to monitor temperatures and fan speeds

First install lm-sensor, and start detect hardware sensors:

sudo apt-get install lm-sensors sudo sensors-detect

Install Psensor from this ppa:jfi/ppa

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:jfi/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install psensor

 
3. Launch startup applications from the dash, add the two indicator as auto-start at login.
in command area:

• system load monitor use indicator-multiload
• psensor use psensor

BackBox Linux for Debian/Ubuntu

Ubuntu Natty 

You can update your system by adding ppa:backbox/two to your system's software sources.

Step 1 - Open a terminal and enter: 

 sudo add-apt-repository ppa:backbox/two 

Your system will now fetch the PPA's key. This enables your Ubuntu system to verify that the packages in the PPA have not been interfered with since they were built. 

Step 2 - Now, as a one-off, you should tell your system to pull down the latest list of software from each archive it knows about, including the PPA you just added: 

 

sudo apt-get update

Now you're ready to start installing software!

  

Other systems 

This PPA also can be added to your system manually by copying the lines below and adding them to your system's software sources.

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/backbox/two/ubuntu natty main

deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/backbox/two/ubuntu natty main

Step 1 - Open a terminal and type: 

sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list

This will open a text editor containing the list of archives that your system is currently using. Scroll to the bottom of the file and paste the lines you copied in the step above. Save the file and exit the text editor. 

Step 2 - Now you need to add that key to your system so Ubuntu can verify the packages from the PPA. In your terminal, enter: 

sudo apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys 78A7ABE1

This will now pull down the PPA's key and add it to your system. 

Step 3 - Now, as a one-off, you should tell your system to pull down the latest list of software from each archive it knows about, including the PPA you just added:

sudo apt-get update

Now you're ready to start installing software!

 

Speed up your Ubuntu 12.04 with preload

Preload is nice little application that could make your linux system a lot faster. 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.

Preload packages are available for almost all linux distributions. And it is available by default in the Synaptic Package Manager and Ubuntu Software Center in Ubuntu. Alternatively, you can install it via Terminal. Type this command

 sudo apt-get install preload

Thats it. Preload will run silently in the background. If you want to further tweak Preload, conf file is available at /etc/preload.conf.

Note that installing preload will not make your system boot faster and that preload is a daemon that runs with root priviledges.

And see the difference.

BackBox Linux

BackBox is a Linux distribution based on Ubuntu. It has been developed to perform penetration tests and security assessments. Designed to be fast, easy to use and provide a minimal yet complete desktop environment, thanks to its own software repositories, always being updated to the latest stable version of the most used and best known ethical hacking tools.

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