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I just downloaded e4rat to cut down the booting time of my laptop. Right now the boot time is somewhere around 50 secs. I read I can get it down to 20 secs or even less if I'm lucky. Problem is e4rat seems won't install. When I click on downloaded file Software Centre opens up and I just click on "install" (no brainer). But after that I just get an icon on Unity bar that shows install progress without any actual progress. Appears as if it freezes. Can't click on it. When I hover over it it just says "waiting to install" and that's all. Reboot didn't help.

Any ideas what I can do ?

Mark Alexa
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1 Answers1

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Hi I encountered similar difficulties with both of the software centers and external packages. I therefor use different procedures - that always work:

  • Either, open a terminal maneuver to the location of the deb-file and then run sudo dpkg -i e4rat_0.2.3_[amd64/i386].deb - use the correct corresponding architecture (no brackets). If it tells you something about unmet dependencies etc. - don't worry we will fix this with a sudo apt-get install -f
  • Or use gdebi a graphical tool for installation of deb-packages. You might have to install it with sudo apt-get install gdebi and a right-click on your downloaded package will give you the option to open it in gdebi.

About e4rat: I am not quit sure if you want to do this.

First of all for it to work you will have to uninstall ureadahead which in some way does a similar job.

Second this software has not seen any update in four years - might also be a sign the developers did great work.

Thirdly there are other ways of compressing boot times. And I would try them first. Yet further steps depend on your version of Ubuntu and might be a whole new question. Possible starting point on a brand new version (16.04 or 16.10) of Ubuntu might be the third answer in this question How do I improve boot speed?

d1bro
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  • Well I'm running Ubuntu 16.04 lts (right now I don't see point of upgrading to 16.10) – Mark Alexa Nov 29 '16 at 16:59
  • I tried sudo dpkg -i e4rat_0.2.3_[amd64/i386].deb, where I entered "amd" into the square brackets. Terminal says "no such directory". Will definitely try that link you shared. Thanks for taking time to share this with me. Appreciate it. – Mark Alexa Nov 29 '16 at 17:02
  • I like the idea of getting SSD but to be honest it would be a nightmare to open up this laptop. This laptop ain't one of them where you just unscrew few screws pop open the back lid and vuala everything is nice and fully accessible. Opening this laptop would likely leave some marks behind and that ain't worth it .... – Mark Alexa Nov 29 '16 at 17:06
  • "Or use gdebi a graphical tool for installation of deb-packages. You might have to install it with sudo apt-get install gdebi and a right-click on your downloaded package will give you the option to open it in gdebi. About e4rat: I am not quit sure if you want to do this.

    First of all for it to work you will have to uninstall ureadahead which in some way does a similar job."

    Thanks for the tutorial. I successfully uninstalled the ureadahead and installed gdebi instead. After that e4rat installation proceeded without errors. Thanks for that ! Now let's see how much I can cut down ...

     – Mark Alexa Nov 29 '16 at 17:16
  • @MarkAlexa only for clarification, the dpkg command works without brackets - I edited this in the answer. "brand new" refers to 16.04 and 16.10, since 12.04 and 14.04 are still supported, yet latter mentioned ones use different Init systems. P.s.: since this answered your Question, would you mind to mark the answer as accepted? thx – d1bro Nov 29 '16 at 18:25