Speed up web surfing in Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid)

by Hamish Taylor

Monday, 17 November 2008

Page 1 of 2 ! In a continuing series of articles highlighting that GNU/Linux is a viable replacement operating system, today we're exploring one quick way to speed up your web browsing experience in the popular Ubuntu distribution. Everyone wants to have a faster web browsing experience! In this short How-To I'm going to cover an easy way of doing this using the recently released Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid distribution. My recommendation in this article is to install a proxy server on your local computer. This stores local copies (caching) of web sites on your computers hard drive. Update: Originally I was going to post a second article about how to share the proxy server across a LAN and to enable filtering and reporting on it, but this content in this article was not well received by readers, so I have incorporated that information into the discussion forum. The link to the discussion forum is here. When you surf to a site it checks the cache first and it it finds the page or image there, it loads directly from the local hard drive copy. This is much faster than downloading again from the Internet, especially if you don't have a fast connection speed and it has the added benefit of reducing downloads from the Internet. To install and use this in Ubuntu 8.10 is incredibly simple. Go to the System menu, select Administration and then Synaptic Package Manager. Click on search and type in squid. In the main part of the window, you'll need to go about two-thirds of the way down the page until you find squid. Right-click on it and select Mark for Installation. Click Apply. This will then install squid and any dependencies it has (squid-common from memory). As this is a relatively tiny application this really only takes a few seconds. When this is done, go to Firefox and click on Edit, Preferences, Advanced, Network, Settings. Click on Manual proxy configuration, and type into the box marked "Http proxy" the word localhost. In the port number, type in 3128. You can also tick the "Use this proxy for all protocols box". Now go to any website and see if it works. If it does then you have successfully installed squid! If you can't get websites to load, then please read onto Page 2 for two very simple troubleshooting tips and tricks. << First page <   1 2 Next page > Last page - Post your comment >>

 

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