The Howto (and Howto-Not) Corner

1. reset
2. if that doesn't help, ESC c should supposedly do a full reset (seems not to work for me)
   
3. or enable the xterm menu:
   

   XTerm*vtMenu*softreset*Label:  Do Soft Reset
   XTerm*vtMenu*hardreset*Label:  Do Full Reset

It used to be a matter of dpkg-reconfigure locales to get the locales you want. Not any more. At least in Ubuntu you have to install the relevant language packs.

1. apt-get install language-pack-et language-pack-en # Estonian and English
2. update-locale LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8 LANG=en_US.UTF-8 # set default to English
   

xubuntu-desktop-expert:

1. either don't depend on xorg-video-all and xorg-input-all or purge unused modules after install.
2. either don't depend on Eastern fonts or purge unused ones after install.
3. add localepurge, debfoster, deborphan
   

If you want to do it manually from Windows 95/98:

1. mkdir c:\boot; cd boot
2. download http://kent.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/grub4dos/grub_for_dos-0.4.2.zip and unzip to boot
3. download http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/feisty/main/installer-i386/current/images/netboot/ubuntu-installer/i386/initrd.gz and http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/feisty/main/installer-i386/current/images/netboot/ubuntu-installer/i386/linux
4. create a menu.lst file. I've chosen to install the minimal server edition, consult http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/feisty/main/installer-i386/current/images/netboot/ubuntu-installer/i386/pxelinux.cfg/default
   if you want to install the full Gnome Ubuntu edition.
   menu.lst
   title Install Ubuntu Server Edition
   kernel (hd0,0)/boot/linux base-installer/kernel/linux/extra-packages-2.6= tasks=standard pkgsel/language-pack-patterns= pkgsel/install-language-support=false vga=normal --
   initrd (hd0,0)/boot/initrd.gz
   
5. reboot into plain DOS (press F8 during boot and choose Safe mode command prompt),
   cd boot
   grub (or grub --config-file="c:\boot\menu.lst")
   
6. Ubuntu installation will start.
   

XP installation is similar, just append c:\grldr="Install Ubuntu" to c:\boot.ini.

Possible errors:
It may happen, that the filesystem type is not properly changed if you chose to setup partition table manually. Grub fails to install in that case and grub-install will fail with a confusing message "file ...boot/grub/stage1 not read correctly". Just umount /target, fdisk /dev/hda and fix the partition type + rerun Install grub boot loader from menu.

1. sudo apt-get install python-dev libgmp3-dev build-essential
2. cd tmp; wget http://gmpy.googlecode.com/files/gmpy-1.02-1.zip
3. unzip gmpy-1.02-1.zip
4. cd gmpy-1.02
5. sudo python setup.py install
   

http://www.santa-li.com/linuxonbb.html:

You can pick an arbitrarily large window size (for the most part) and not have to worry too much about making it too big. I use a window size of 512 KB (or 524288 bytes) myself, and I have no problems at all. My brother, who runs Linux over a different broadband provider than I have, had some trouble with using 512 KB--so, instead he used 256 KB (or 262144 bytes) which worked better for him. Typically, you will notice that your connection is actually slower than the default settings if your window size is too big. That being said, you should try out different size window sizes and see what works best for you--but, in most cases either 512 KB, 256 KB, or 128 KB seem to do the trick quite nicely.

/etc/sysctl.conf (substituting your window size in place of 524288, if necessary):

# Tweaks for faster broadband...
net.core.rmem_default = 524288
net.core.rmem_max = 524288
net.core.wmem_default = 524288
net.core.wmem_max = 524288
net.ipv4.tcp_wmem = 4096 87380 524288
net.ipv4.tcp_rmem = 4096 87380 524288
net.ipv4.tcp_mem = 524288 524288 524288
net.ipv4.tcp_rfc1337 = 1
net.ipv4.ip_no_pmtu_disc = 0
net.ipv4.tcp_sack = 1
net.ipv4.tcp_fack = 1
net.ipv4.tcp_window_scaling = 1
net.ipv4.tcp_timestamps = 1
net.ipv4.tcp_ecn = 0
net.ipv4.route.flush = 1

sudo sysctl -p

And turn off IPv6:

sudo su
echo 'alias net-pf-10 off' >> /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist_ipv6

Check after reboot:
lsmod | grep ipv6
dmesg | grep 'family 10'

This is inspired, but not limited by http://kmandla.wordpress.com/2006/11/11/howto-set-up-edgy-for-speed/ .

1. Use hashed b-trees to speed up lookups in large directories when creating filesystems:
   sudo mke2fs -j -O dir_index /dev/hda1
2. Optimize directories.
   e2fsck -fD /dev/hda1
   man e2fsck:
   -D Optimize directories in filesystem. This option causes e2fsck
   to try to optimize all directories, either by reindexing them if
   the filesystem supports directory indexing, or by sorting and
   compressing directories for smaller directories, or for filesys‐
   tems using traditional linear directories.
   
3. Use data=writeback and noatime when mounting ext3 partitions (/etc/fstab):
   /dev/hda1 / ext3 defaults,data=writeback,noatime 0 1
   sudo tune2fs -o journal_data_writeback /dev/hda1
   From man mount:
   writeback
   Data ordering is not preserved - data may be written into
   the main file system after its metadata has been commit‐
   ted to the journal. This is rumoured to be the highest-
   throughput option. It guarantees internal file system
   integrity, however it can allow old data to appear in
   files after a crash and journal recovery.
   noatime
   Do not update inode access times on this file system
   (e.g, for faster access on the news spool to speed up
   news servers).
   
4. Choose an I/O scheduler wisely. Although CFQ should be the default, it does no harm to force it by passing elevator=cfq to kernel command line (by editing /boot/grub/menu.lst and running update-grub).
   Check your current scheduler:
   cat /sys/block/hda/queue/scheduler # or
   dmesg | grep scheduler
   
   From http://www.redhat.com/magazine/008jun05/features/schedulers/ :
   

   The Completely Fair Queuing (CFQ) scheduler is the default algorthim in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4. As the name implies, CFQ maintains a scalable per-process I/O queue and attempts to distribute the available I/O bandwidth equally among all I/O requests. CFQ is well suited for mid-to-large multi-processor systems and for systems which require balanced I/O performance over multiple LUNs and I/O controllers.

   The Deadline elevator uses a deadline algorithm to minimize I/O latency for a given I/O request. The scheduler provides near real-time behavior and uses a round robin policy to attempt to be fair among multiple I/O requests and to avoid process starvation. Using five I/O queues, this scheduler will aggressively re-order requests to improve I/O performance.

   The NOOP scheduler is a simple FIFO queue and uses the minimal amount of CPU/instructions per I/O to accomplish the basic merging and sorting functionality to complete the I/O. It assumes performance of the I/O has been or will be optimized at the block device (memory-disk) or with an intelligent HBA or externally attached controller.

   The Anticipatory elevator introduces a controlled delay before dispatching the I/O to attempt to aggregate and/or re-order requests improving locality and reducing disk seek operations. This algorithm is intended to optimize systems with small or slow disk subsystems. One artifact of using the AS scheduler can be higher I/O latency.

5. Check that DMA is enabled.
   dmesg | grep -i dma

6. Consider using readahead, prelink and preload. Prelink is generally a must. Readahead may cut boot times.
   
   • Readahead allows the user to specify a set of files to be read into the page cache to accelerate first time loading of programs, typically during the boot sequence.
   • The prelink package contains a utility which modifies ELF shared libraries and executables, so that far fewer relocations need to be resolved at runtime and thus programs come up faster.
   • preload 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.
   sudo apt-get install readahead prelink preload
   sudo sed -i 's/PRELINK=.*/PRELINK=yes/' /etc/default/prelink
   pass 'profile' option to kernel with grub on next boot, so that readahead can be reprofiled
   
7. Enable concurrent boot.
   sudo sed -i 's/CONCURRENCY=.*/CONCURRENCY=shell/' /etc/init.d/rc
8. Place the swap partition wisely. Sectors are generally numbered starting from the outside of the disk, so either try to place swap close to sector 0 (on the outside of the drive, where read/write speed may or may not be higher) or in the middle. Let me quote:
   Modern disks have more sectors in outer than in inner tracks but nevertheless placing swap partitions at the outer rim of the disk is questionable. The usage pattern of swap partitions involves short transfers between head movements. Therefore increasing throughput is less important then reducing seek time. It is better to place swap partitions at around the middle of the disk (but notice that the disk lies to fdisk about its true geometry and does not tell about outer tracks being bigger than inner ones so what looks to be the middle of the disk in fdisk is not the physical middle).
9. Control swapping according to your memory resources.
   Quoting:
   
   • If you have a lot of memory and succeed in not using swap at all then set vm.swappiness to 0
   • If your computer has little memory and needs to swap much set vm.swappiness to 100
   • A good default in between is vm.swappiness=60
   It is possible to turn off swapping in Xubuntu with 512 mb of memory or more and in Ubuntu (Gnome) with more than 512 mb of memory.
   sudo sysctl vm.swappiness=0
   sudo swapoff -a
   sudo swapon -a
   sudo su
   echo 'vm.swappiness=0' >> /etc/sysctl.conf
10. Turn off IPv6:
    sudo su
    echo 'alias net-pf-10 off' >> /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist_ipv6
    check after reboot:
    lsmod | grep ipv6
    Also turn off ipv6 in Firefox/Iceweasel:
    about:config
    
11. Turn off filesystem checking for foreign filesystems and for filesystems that don't need to be checked (this will considerably speed up boot):
    edit /etc/fstab and set last number to 0 for filesystems that don't need checking, e.g.
    UUID=x /media/sda7 ntfs defaults,nls=utf8,umask=007,gid=46 0 0
    

The basic recepie:

1. sudo debootstrap etch etch/ ftp://ftp.ee.debian.org/debian
   
2. sudo chroot etch
3. apt-get install localepurge
   
4. apt-get --purge remove dselect aptitude dhcp3-client dhcp3-common info man-db manpages dmidecode laptop-detect
5. apt-get install grub initrd-tools linux-image-686 ssh python-minimal
   
6. mkdir /boot/grub; update-grub
7. apt-get clean
8. APT cache:
   6.4M /var/cache/apt/pkgcache.bin
   6.4M /var/cache/apt/srcpkgcache.bin
   19M /var/lib/apt/lists/archive.ubuntu.com_ubuntu_dists_etch_main_binary-i386_Packages
   3.6M /var/lib/dpkg/info
   internationalization:
   6.9M /usr/share/i18n
   4.9M /usr/lib/gconv
   documentation:
   8.2M /usr/share/doc
   4.7M /usr/share/man
   zoneinfo:
   5.6M /usr/share/zoneinfo
   kernel modules:
   44M lib/modules/2.6.18-4-686/kernel
9. time for cleanup:
1. vi /etc/apt/sources.list, comment everything out. This will temporarily disable apt
2. apt-get update
3. rm /usr/share/i18n/{charmaps,locales}/*
4. rm -rf /usr/lib/gconv # or at least
   for i in IBM INIS EBCDIC MAC ISO- ISO_ KOI JOHAB CP BIG5 EUC ECMA ARM ASM GEOR GOST GREEK LATIN NATS GB SJIS; do rm /usr/lib/gconv/${i}*; done
5. rm -rf /usr/share/{doc,man}/*
6. boot into the system and check what modules are actually in use with lsmod, remove the modules you don't need (e.g. who needs sound in a router? or even better, build your own kernel):
   rm -rf /lib/modules/2.6.18-4-686/kernel/sound
   rm -rf /lib/modules/2.6.18-4-686/kernel/drivers/isdn
   rm -rf /lib/modules/2.6.18-4-686/kernel/drivers/net/wireless
   rm -rf /lib/modules/2.6.18-4-686/kernel/drivers/media
   rm -rf /lib/modules/2.6.18-4-686/kernel/drivers/scsi/pcmcia
   version=2.6.18-4-686
   depmod -a -F /boot/System.map-$version $version
   update-initramfs -u # to check that nothing is broken
   # other redundant modules:
   /lib/modules/2.6.18-4-686/kernel/net/{ax25,ipx,x25,ipv6,appletalk,atm,bluetooth,decnet,econet,irda}
   /lib/modules/2.6.18-4-686/kernel/fs/{reiserfs,smbfs,qnx4,xfs,befs,bfs,affs,afs,coda,cifs,freevxfs,hfs,hfsplus,hpfs,ocfs2,nfs,nfs_common,nfsd,ncpfs,ufs,udf}
   # remove modules that you don't need from (spacehogs):
   # /lib/modules/2.6.18-4-686/kernel/drivers/net
   # /lib/modules/2.6.18-4-686/kernel/drivers/scsi
   rm /lib/modules/2.6.18-4-686/kernel/drivers/scsi/sata*.ko
   rm -rf /lib/modules/2.6.18-4-686/kernel/drivers/scsi/aic7xxx*
   
   
10. we are down to 97M now:
    97M /
    
11. configure timezone, hosts, hostname, network interfaces, fstab, name resolver:
    
1. tzconfig
2. echo '127.0.0.1 localhost' > /etc/hosts # see http://www.howtoforge.com/perfect_setup_debian_etch_p3 for IPv6
   
3. echo 'my.hostname' > /etc/hostname
4. vi /etc/network/interfaces
   iface lo inet loopback
   ...
   
5. vi /etc/fstab
   #
   proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
   /dev/hda2 none swap sw 0 0
   /dev/hda1 / ext3 defaults,errors=remount-ro 0 1
   
6. vi /etc/resolv.conf
   nameserver x.x.x.x
12. set root password or add an ordinary user and install sudo
    passwd
    
13. disable IPv6 if you don't need it
14. boot target with Knoppix, tomsrtbt or whatever other rescue tools you have
15. create a parition for the new system, mkfs, mount and cd to target root
    
16. transfer the filesystem:
    nc -lp 5555 | tar xf - # in target system
    cd etch; sudo tar cf - . | nc target 5555
    
17. In target: chroot .; grub-install /dev/hda OR if you are unable to run grub from the target, create a grub floppy:
1. dd if=/boot/grub/stage1 of=/dev/fd0 bs=512
   dd if=/boot/grub/stage2 of=/dev/fd0 bs=512 seek=1
2. in grub shell:
   root (hd0,0)
   kernel /vmlinuz root=/dev/hda1 ro
   initrd /initrd.img
   boot
3. when booted into target, run grub install
   if proc is not mounted, grub will complain Could Not Find Device For /boot,
   mount proc /proc
   cp /proc/mounts /etc/mtab
   grub-install /dev/hda
   
18. ready, reboot target
19. update-locale LC_ALL=C LANG=C
    
20. setup /etc/iftab
21. update-alternatives --set editor /usr/bin/vim.tiny
22. apt-get install sudo; visudo
    # or user ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: ALL
    %admin ALL=(ALL) ALL