Monday, August 08, 2005

Turning Off the Lights

Sometimes, after you set up your computer, you find that the default installation is running things that you don't really need. For instance, this computer is currently running some kind of Bluetooth server. I don't own a bluetooth device, so that's useless.

I got a reminder about how to fix these kind of things from this Boot Fedora Faster Howto article. OK, there are things in there that I'm not going to do, since I don't plan to recompile the kernel any time soon. (Thanks, Dave. Don't mention it, Hal) However, you can "turn off the lights" in rooms that you aren't occupying at the time. In Gnome, according to the article, you click on Desktop->System Tools->Server Settings->Services. If you work from an Xterm, the corresponding command is

system-config-services

You'll be asked for your root password, and then you'll get a menu of system services. A check-mark indicates that the given service will start on boot, so uncheck those you don't need. To stop a service right now, right-click on it and select "Stop" from the menu.

Doing this increases system security, since you aren't running things you don't need, and should speed up your computer, since you don't need to start up useless programs on boot.

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