Stopping of unnecessary services during startup

For convenience, a lot of services are started when Ubuntu starts up. This can include services which you'll probably never need or want, either because you just don't want them (e. g. ntpdate, setting your system time from a time server) or you simply don't have the device (e. g. the HP printing and scanning system which is of no use for you if you don't own a HP device). Other services are mandatory for Ubuntu to work properly on your computer.

While it generally does not harm to have these services started, they increase the time it takes to start your computer, by deactivating some of these services you should get a slightly faster start up time.

A simple tool to manage the start of services is BUM, the boot-up manager. There are other tools available which allow a fine grained editing of services, such as sysv-rc-conf, a ncurses based tool, which gives you control over all services. However for this tutorial we will be focusing on BUM.

Installing BUM

BUM is available in the Universe repository

Running BUM

BUM needs super user privileges to run, so to start it use

sudo bum

and enter your password when required.

BUM can take a while to start up so be prepared to wait for it a couple of minutes.

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Warning: Disabling some services will stop your system from booting or running properly.

Within bum you can activate/deactivate the start of a service by simply clicking on the checkbox at the beginning of the line for each of the listed services.

It may be sufficient to work on the first tab in BUM. However if you switch to the 'Services' tab, you will see a short explanation for each service, which might help to identify services you don't need. If you uncheck a service which is already running, you are asked whether it should be stopped.

Remember, make sure you know what the service does before preventing it from running. e.g. it is most likely not a good idea to prevent the cupsys service from being started, if you want to print via cups. If in doubt, leave the service enabled until you've been able to find out more about it

Command Line

Rcconf is an ncurses based GUI for services, like Bum but it can be used via the command line (server install). It just has the function to dis- or enable services and daemons.

sudo apt-get install rcconf

sudo rcconf