Gary Ruben wrote:

A friend sent me this link to a shell script which claims to speed up the standard Ubuntu Dapper Drake distro. http://www.dylanknightrogers.com/2006/07/17/faster-dappersh/

Hmm. I just looked through the script, and I would guess that the main "felt" speedup results from the addition of prelinking. Interestingly, the script warns that enabling automatic prelink for newly installed packages, as the script does, will noticeably slow down software installs. I wonder if that's why everyone complains that yum/rpm on Fedora is slower than apt-get, because Fedora has always had prelink and always runs it on newly installed packages.