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I have a CR48, had one for years. Love the little gremlin, but it is still a single core machine with the chances of upgrading the processor being slim and none (Even then what looks to be the best upgrade candidate processor is 'just' a dual core with similar clock speed.)

The 4.2 kernel does help on it's own, but as someone who's never tried to build a kernel from source, what could I do to further tune it to my specific hardware while at the same time not slamming the door on possible upgrades to wifi or possibly the screen itself.

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I don't think building a kernel from source is going to make your computer run any better. The kernel is already optimized and optimizing it further would require a deep level of expertise in kernel development.

If you can provide more information about what OS you would like to run on it, or what tasks it struggles with, we may be able to provide useful tweaks.

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  • Right now looking to install peppermint OS 6 (Think it's based off Ubuntu 15.04) and other than general 'I want to tune this to within an inch of its life' browsing is where this thing chokes, and probably always will because single core. I do have a Broadcom video card coming in so that should help with video, but that still leaves page rendering as painful at times. I've used Pale Moon and... maybe it's just me but I don't see that huge of a difference compared to chromium. Maybe I'm doing something wrong. The CR48 uses a single core baytrail processor (N455.) Commented Mar 17, 2016 at 17:19
  • @AndrewSingleton Yeah unfortunately I think the processor is going to be your biggest bottleneck. I would recommend using Firefox as your browser of choice because from what I've read it seems to use the least RAM and still run spiffy on weaker systems. I would also suggest looking at powertop which you can use to extend the battery life. Commented Mar 17, 2016 at 17:39
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I disagree with the above poster in that you can make your computer faster by optimizing the kernel configuration and utilizing a newer kernel as sometimes they have improved drivers, especially in areas like wifi and gpus. That said, a more dramatic increase to speeds can be made with userspace modifications.

I looked at the specs on the wiki for your computer (weak CPU, not a lot of RAM) and here's what I would do (ordered from greatest improvement to least improvement):

1) Revisit your applications: you don't have a lot of CPU horsepower so I would scrap Firefox/Chrome and go with something like Opera or Midori. For PDFs, use Evince. Try to find lightweight alternatives to all of your normal applications.

2) Consider using a lightweight desktop, not Gnome, Unity, or KDE. I would go with XFCE, LXDE, OpenBox, or even Joe's Window Manager if you don't mind some additional configuration. If you don't want to spend a lot of time on this, I would choose a different distro that focuses on being lightweight, has 64-bit support, and has one of the desktop environments I mentioned as the default.

3) To optimize the SSD: take a look at https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Solid_State_Drives. In particular, I would recommend the noatime mount option, enabling trim, and setting the I/O scheduler to noop.

4) Try out the latest stable kernel and recompile, selecting your specific processor in the configuration at the very least. There are several other optimizations you could try but this is a good starting point.

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  • Been using LXDE Based userspace more or less since I flashed the bios. Tried Midori and in theory it's lgihter, I didn't notice much of an improvement over chromium, but good idea. Also nice idea on the whole PDF thing. Generally use leafpad or focuswriter (I use focuswriter a lot since it saves to odt if I want to use formatting.) Nice find on the SSD front, thanks. Any advice on 'newbie's first kernel compile' guides? Again, thanks for chipping in, appreciate it. Commented Mar 17, 2016 at 18:20
  • It's not pretty, but try Dillo if you need speed more than correct rendering and you visit mainly static pages. Another thing, if you don't mind the power draw and heat is not an issue, try the performance CPU governor mentioned here: wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/CPU_frequency_scaling. As far as the kernel goes, I'd say just try to find a 4.4.6 kernel from your repos as further tweaking is not likely to yield big improvements. If you're still not fast enough, try a uclibc/musl busybox-based distro like Alpine Linux. I use a similar userspace on the Raspberry Pi and it flies. Commented Mar 17, 2016 at 19:26
  • Try going through your services and make sure you're not wasting any resources. For example, turn off ssh unless you absolutely need it. Also, scrap network manager and manually configure your network. Commented Mar 17, 2016 at 19:28
  • I mainly do kernel configuration tweaks to add security (no remote kernel debugging, fstack-protector=strong, no user access to dmesg), improve boot times, and avoid loading an initrd. I'm not sure how much of an improvement you get from tweaking the processor architecture but it's something I always do. None of these will have a significant impact on running applications except maybe the processor architecture, but I have not tested the difference. Commented Mar 17, 2016 at 19:52

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