Ubuntu 11.10 Slow? Here's a possible cure!

Are you sick and tired of Ubuntu 11.10 running very slowly? In fact, I wouldn't call it running - I would call it crawling - at best! Out of my few machines, I've only upgraded (if you can call it that!) one machine to Ubuntu 11.10.

The reason I didn't upgrade the rest of my boxes is because it became plainly obvious that this was the worst Ubuntu upgrade ever. Not only was it slow, sound was a complete failure... and a few other things too, but not as generally as important as user interface speed and video and sound.

I had a problem that sound wasn't quite behaving as it should. I couldn't find any mixers to change the input and output levels for the headphone output and the line-level output. I use the headphone output to a small pair of USB speakers and the line level outputs to a larger entertainment system.

Searching around, I found that there are issues with pulseaudio and alsa-base which not only mess with the sound, but also mess with the system's overall performance.


Here's the solution I found (cut'n'paste each line individually and execute it):

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get remove --purge alsa-base
sudo apt-get remove --purge pulseaudio
sudo apt-get clean && sudo apt-get autoremove
sudo apt-get install alsa-base
sudo apt-get install pulseaudio


Then, do this to fix up some stuff that gets broken by the above:

sudo apt-get install ubuntu-desktop


Now, reboot... even into the new default UI. If you're as lucky as I was, you might be surprised and the machine might perform quite a lot closer to how it behaved under 11.04 and earlier, albeit with the new 'slick' interface.


Here's the original source for the solution:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1863271&page=2 - Check post #16.

Note that my machine is very old - an AMD Opteron 144 overclocked to 2.1 GHz with 2 Gb RAM and a newer nVidia card. I'm sure there are other optimisations that can be performed and I'll make sure to post those as soon as I know more.

Happy computing!!