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vanquishedangel

Member

Registered: 2023-02-11

Posts: 61

Tips for setting up an old Dell latitude d430 for work, Aquarius

So I am creating this post to help others and also remember what I did because I have done so much tweaking. This may also help other computers from this era.

1. I installed Q4os Trinity desktop pure
2. installed gufw and turned it on (needed for due diligence, i work with medical records)
3. installed Brave as the default Browser
4. installed Evolution-ews and evolution as it works with my personal and work emails and also the calendar app is amazing, really close to Thunderbird. Also works with sendinc for message encryption by setting the smtp server to use the sendinc API. heavy system resources but has a lot of functionality, not as heavy as Thunderbird. It works with office 365 as well for calendar (though may take a lot of tweaking). Also install evolution-plugin-spamassassin.
5. install clamtk (needed for due diligence, I work in medical records)
6. Logging uses Onenote, so install npm, node.js, and nvm and then install p3x-onenote to interface better with office 365 One note, and can access calendar to. better then browser access. There is also a .deb now.
7. install and use pidgin to access slack (requires https://github.com/dylex/slack-libpurple, username is member ID from slack and password is your workspace password) and facebook https://github.com/dequis/purple-facebook Remember to disable 2 factor authentication for pidgin to connect then re-enable it after in facebook settings.
8. install zram
9. install team viewer to access main desk computer remotely
10. install tlp-gui, you will need to download it and learn to use it.
11. install irqbalance (this has a lot of negative reviews but it seems to work great on this computer, I suspect this was made for early dual cores). Sped things up.
12. install tlp. This helps save battery, but it also helps regulate temperature, this prevents throttling.
13. apply hard drive tweaks, in my case for an ssd with a pata connection. https://askubuntu.com/questions/1400/ho … s-for-ssds. less writes also helps regular hard drives and can speed them up to. enable trim for older SSD.
14. minimize swap usage by changing swappiness.
15 install libreoffice for writing up forms for staff and residents.
16. turn on zswap https://www.addictivetips.com/ubuntu-li … -on-linux/
17 keep a small black thumbnail to use as wall paper, the smallest I have ever found is attached. works for cell phones as well.
18. Enabled badmemory in grub.
19. installed prelink and execstack (debian stretch version)! prelink is obsoleted on newer devices due to SSD, faster ram, and faster CPUs, however when a device gets old, it is useful still as it reduces ram usage and speeds up loading time for apps. On this device it greatly helps. Run "Sudo prelink -amf". I could not attach prelink (https://pkgs.org/download/prelink)
20 test MTU setting: ping -M do -s 1472 howtoforge.com and ctrl+c to stop, lower by 10 each time until 0 packet loss, then set MTU to the highest number with 0 packet loss
21 Set "post-up /sbin/ip link set (connection name) txqueuelen 10000" in /etc/network/interfaces
22. applied a lighter weight font to everything Bitstream Charter and bitstream vera sans.
23. Tried to apply lightweight icons. picked waterleaf
24. went through the control panel and set backgrounds to no wall paper or no picture.
25. installed these plugings in Brave; ublock origin, TamperMonkey, Save-Data .
26. installed these scripts into tampermonkey/grease monkey; web access accelerator, Disable youtube 60 fps.
27. install haveged
28. install rng-tools5
29. use lz4 for swap compression (https://baronhk.wordpress.com/2021/10/0 … gnu-linux/)
30. Speed up firefox-esr here: https://smallbusiness.chron.com/set-ram … 41282.html and here: https://www.tecmint.com/speed-firefox-linux/
31. Set up and use earlyoom sudo apt install earlyoom && sudo systemctl enable earlyoom https://baronhk.wordpress.com/2021/10/0 … gnu-linux/
32. Set parameters for e2fsck and run it, to run it try "sudo e2fsck -vcck /dev/sda1". To check parameters to see if it gets run at intervals run "sudo tune2fs -l /dev/sda1 | egrep -h 'Maximum mount count|Check interval|Last checked'" and then "sudo tune2fs -c 20 -i "1m" /dev/sda1" to set it to every 20 mounts or 30 days, whatever comes first.. (great for older or used drives). You can set this parameter for all partitions (ext type) except swap.
33. Install fdpowermon for a battery indicator, it is less buggy then TDEpowersave and uses less resources.
34. Install MPV as a light weight media player.
35. Change cpu governor to schedutil in /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_governor

Last edited by vanquishedangel (2023-08-10 02:52)

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bin

Member

From: U.K.

Registered: 2016-01-28

Posts: 1,273

Re: Tips for setting up an old Dell latitude d430 for work, Aquarius

You've obviously worked hard to get all this running - congratulations.

Just a thought on the swap stuff. If you've installed zram and have moved swap to an external(ish) drive, have you set the priorities in fstab?

You might want to look at zswap as an alternative. An SD card will be appalling slow for swapping, PCMCIA not a whole lot faster.

vanquishedangel

Member

Registered: 2023-02-11

Posts: 61

Re: Tips for setting up an old Dell latitude d430 for work, Aquarius

You've obviously worked hard to get all this running - congratulations.

Just a thought on the swap stuff. If you've installed zram and have moved swap to an external(ish) drive, have you set the priorities in fstab?

You might want to look at zswap as an alternative. An SD card will be appalling slow for swapping, PCMCIA not a whole lot faster.

Yes I zram installed and running, but sometimes (rare though) it needs a bit more. I have also changed a few things on the list as I get more working and configured properly.

vanquishedangel

Member

Registered: 2023-02-11

Posts: 61

Re: Tips for setting up an old Dell latitude d430 for work, Aquarius

You've obviously worked hard to get all this running - congratulations.

Just a thought on the swap stuff. If you've installed zram and have moved swap to an external(ish) drive, have you set the priorities in fstab?

You might want to look at zswap as an alternative. An SD card will be appalling slow for swapping, PCMCIA not a whole lot faster.

I am sorry, I miss read your post initially. Thank you for the suggestion of zswap! it helped a lot and it did speed it up it seems. Yes the priority was set in fstab and zram comes before use of swap, but now thanks to you, zswap will reduce the swap time when using the sd card. having to interact with office 365 consumes a lot of ram

I Also stress tested it and it was amazing. initially having 3 tabs open (onenote, calendar, search results) p3x-onenote,  and Thunderbird slowed it to a crawl without zswap.

Now I had 5 tabs open ( 365 calander, word document editing, youtube, 2 searches) p3x-onenote, evolution, 2 terminals htop and swapon -s, and ran slack. While the programs slowed to respond or completely open (slack took about 10 minutes), they all ran and windows were way more responsive! I used 1 gig of swap (zram 256, the rest on the sd card). I could move the mouse and close windows. While may windows popped up unresponsive, I clicked continue and they did continue. It was faster to close windows as well when I closed them to reclaim memory. This is a game changer.

Last edited by vanquishedangel (2023-03-25 05:10)

bin

Member

From: U.K.

Registered: 2016-01-28

Posts: 1,273

Re: Tips for setting up an old Dell latitude d430 for work, Aquarius

Good stuff - glad it helped. I admire your tenacity.

vanquishedangel

Member

Registered: 2023-02-11

Posts: 61

Re: Tips for setting up an old Dell latitude d430 for work, Aquarius

So I am close to done with modifying things and I am pretty happy. This will work for work tasks really well.

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