SSDs (solid state drives) are great. They’re shock resistant, consume less power, produce less heat, and have very fast seek times. If you have a Ubuntu computer with an SSD, such as an Eee PC, there are some tweaks you can make to increase performance and extend the life of the disk.

1. The simplest tweak is to mount volumes using the noatime option. By default Linux will write the last accessed time attribute to files. This can reduce the life of your SSD by causing a lot of writes. The noatime mount option turns this off.
   Open your fstab file:
   

   sudo gedit /etc/fstab

   
   Ubuntu uses the relatime option by default. For your SSD partitions (formatted as ext3), replace relatime with noatime in fstab. Reboot for the changes to take effect.
   
2. Using a ramdisk instead of the Ubuntu SSD to store temporary files will speed things up, but will cost you a few megabytes of RAM.
   Open your fstab file:
   

   sudo gedit /etc/fstab

   
   Add this line to fstab to mount /tmp (temporary files) as tmpfs (temporary file system):
   

   tmpfs /tmp tmpfs defaults,noatime,mode=1777 0 0

   
   Reboot for the changes to take effect. Running df, you should see a new line with /tmp mounted on tmpfs:
   

   tmpfs 513472 30320 483152 6% /tmp

   
   

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Being a fan on Ubuntu, I always keep an eye on its progress and development from time to time. Having bough a new Eee PC 901, an Intel Atom-based notebook with RAM 1 GB, 20 GB SSD, and a cute small display of 9 inch, I am curious of installing the new version of Ubuntu called as 9.04. I’ve got the previous Ubuntu class, 8.10 installed into my notebook soon after I bought this Asus-branded notebook. Ubuntu 9.04 seems to be exciting to have instead my existing old version of it.
Ubuntu 9.04 has been released since April 23, 2009, a Cannonical’s tenth, designed by Jaunty Jacklope. New features of Ubuntu 9.04 include faster booting time, integration of web services and application into the desktop interface. Its new usplash screen and login screen supports the Eee PC 901. These features are factors that drove me impatient to make it installed into my current notebook.


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