I've recently started exploring Ubuntu (my 1st distro).

I fresh installed precise without a swap (4GB ram).

The only issues are, slow boot (regardless of the swap) and instability after a few days of installation. The runtime performance is immaculate otherwise.

Even though not needed, I still set swappiness = 10. I've tried the quiet splash profile to GRUB; already have preload installed. But it still is pretty slow. I am not too confident on recompiling the kernel yet. But you could please advice me on that too.

I've also added the following to fstab:

#Move /tmp to RAM:
tmpfs /tmp tmpfs defaults,noexec,nosuid 0 0

(Also if you could please tell me the exact implication/scope of this tweak on physical ram & the swap.)

But nothing has happened really. So what alternatives are there to make it boot faster?

Also, right after fresh install, though no swap partition, the system still showed /dev/zram0 of arond 2GB which was never used (probably because of the above fstab edit).

Finally, I experimented with Hibernate a little, but many claim that it doesn't work on 12.04. (Not to mention, I made a swap file of 4GB for it). What I did was:

sudo gedit /var/lib/polkit-1/localauthority/50-local.d/hibernate.pkla

Then I added the following lines, saved the file, and closed the text editor:

[Re-enable Hibernate]
Identity=unix-user:*
Action=org.freedesktop.upower.hibernate
ResultActive=yes

I also edited the upower policy for hibernate:

gksudo gedit /usr/share/polkit-1/actions/org.freedesktop.upower.policy

I added these lines:

< allow_inactive >no< /allow_inactive >
< allow_active >yes< /allow_active >

But it did not work. So is there an alternate method perhaps that can make it work on 12.04?