Speed Up Linux Mint 15’s Boot-up Times by Disabling ‘Update Manager’

‘Linux Mint’ comes with an update manager of its own called ‘mintUpdate’. It is a very user friendly tool that helps you to keep your OS up-to-date with ease. It also has the ability to checks for updates, and automatically notifies the user, if updates are available as well.

However, as useful as it can be, I have been able to reduce the boot-up times of Linux Mint 15 (Cinnamon) around 17% by simply disabling it from running at the system start-up.

But, disabling the update manager means that you no longer will get automatic update notifications. Though personally, this is not an issue for me, as I am more than happy to manually check for updates, if it means that I can boot into the desktop, a few seconds faster than usual.

However, if keeping your operating system up-to-date is critical to you, then you should better leave it as it is. If not, then you can try the below method and disable the ‘Update Manager’ to see if it can take out a couple of seconds from your PC’s boot-up times.

Step 1:

Click on the ‘Menu’ icon on the taskbar in Cinnamon & search for ‘startup applications’. Then click on its icon to execute it.

Step 2:

From the ‘Start-up Applications’ window, remove the small ‘cross-mark’ under ‘mintUpdate’ as shown below, to disable it.

Once done, close the window.

Step 3:

Then open your Terminal window & enter the below command.

sudo rm /var/lib/ureadahead/pack

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(Optional info) …

What does the above command do ?

Ubuntu ships with a utility called ‘ureadahead’ for speeding-up the boot-up times. It achieves this by first monitoring the OS’s boot-up process, then rearranges the ‘reading order’ of the files used during the boot-up process. It does this in a way so the disk drive (whether it is a spinning disk or a SSD) can find & load those files into the RAM faster, thus reducing the boot-up time.

‘ureadahead’ is pretty much automatic, meaning that, when new services & programs added or removed from the system start-up, it automatically optimizes them during the next system reboot.

However, there can be times where a manual retrace should be forced upon, and that is where the above command comes into action, which once executed, removes ureadahead’s existing (old) database, thus forcing it to recreate a fresh one.

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Once this command is run, reboot your computer (you will notice that the OS takes longer than usual while booting -- just this once).

Then after the desktop gets fully loaded, let the computer idle for another 40 seconds, for achieving the optimum performance, and during this time, ‘ureadahead’ will build & save its new database file called ‘pack’ (in the ‘/var/lib/ureadahead’ folder).

That is pretty much it. Now you can either shutdown or reboot, and the next time you boot your computer using Linux Mint 15, you should see an improvement in the boot-up times.

I’m not sure whether this will make your PC boot faster also, but it has certainly helped with mine.