Best way to install Kubuntu 12.10

[KDE_dude]

I have Kubuntu 12.10 installed on my laptop that has about 750 mbs of RAM installed on it. It runs fine, but I was wondering if there is a better way, performance wise, to install Kubuntu. I thought it would be cool to have it run as fast as possible. Right now I have a swap partition that is about 750 mbs.

What would be the best way to layout my hard drive?

[claydoh]

there is no real way to do an install that will make it run "faster", and a particular partition layout won't really speed things up. With 750mb ram you would need to do things that will reduce your ram footprint, as well as your GPU footprint, perhaps.

An extreme way to cut things is to install the package kubuntu-low-fat-settings, which turns off a ton of stuff, freeing up ram and resources. This also changes the look and feel of application windows and is a bit ugly
http://claydoh.com/slim-it-down/

Also check out some of the advice given here:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1889034
This is a touch old, but the ideas to try are quite valid. low-fat-settings does a lot of these things.

My suggestions on partitioning are to have a separate /home, as this makes reinstalling super easy as you don't have to recover your settings, docs, etc.

If you use suspend/hibernate, you may want ot increase the swap, the rule of thumb there is 1.5 times the amount of ram you have. Your root ("/") should be a minuimum of 5gb, but really 10 is the safest minimum I recommend.

[EkiLibRiuM]

I agree whit the Administrator...I have My self 2 system's on virtual 'the best way to start whit Kubuntu" for me and i can tell that f you want to see the beautty off the KDE developement you need min 1500mb RAM ,but ubuntu is a nice system too and i have a very good one and i will not upgrade ..coz i love thie one...Greet's to the team and Best regard's...

[oshunluvr]

With a single drive system, there's not a whole lot you can do to massively increase file system performance. You can improve things a bit.

I assume you're using ext4 - if so look into the following:

Safe changes:

Setting block size to 4K.
Turning off file/directory access time stamping.
Indexing directories.

Somewhat risky changes:

Disabling barrier sync.
Enabling writeback mode for journaling.
Enabling writeback mode for data.

I am purposely NOT giving you instructions on how to do these things or giving you links because some of these settings increase the likelihood of trashing your filesystem. If you do the research and make an informed decision to use one or more of these options - and the results are bad - then it's not my fault! If you ever use this laptop without having it plugged in, I wouldn't even consider the latter three options.

In any case, the worst that could happen is you'd lose all your data and have to re-install.

EDIT: You might see a slightly faster boot time if you use a separate /boot partition and format it with EXT2 rather than EXT4, but we're talking very small improvements. There's not much you can do with a laptop other than adding RAM and swapping the hard drive for an SSD.

[KDE_dude]

Thanks for the help guys. Have a quick question though. With 12.10 I noticed that they have a LVM option. I have used it before with Fedora but what is it?

[Snowhog]

Logical Volume Manager. But I would not suggest you opt for it -- yet. LVM may not be included in the final release.

[KDE_dude]

Okay, I guess I was wondering what that meant. Does it look at your hard drive and divi it up according to the size?

[Snowhog]

See Logical volume management