Linux Maintenance

[AC]

So, I finally got Mandrake Linux slimmed down to fit on my 500MB partition of my 1GB hard drive of my Pentium Pro 180MHz w/ 64MB RAM. Now, what is required of me to keep it in shape? For example, in Windows, you had to run a couple of utilites such as defrag or scandisk every so often, clear the recycle bin, temporary internet files, and the temp folder, and reboot it every now and then...

 

[Barnaby W. Füi]

hmm...you dont have to defrag or scandisk...the equivelant of scandisk would be fsck and thats only run if you shut down improperly (and you're using ext2)...i guess if you're using a desktop like KDE or gnome then you'll have a trash can, so i guess you'd want to keep an eye on that, but i would think most file operations you would do via cli and when you do an "rm", there is no trash can, its gone forever! temporary internet files - depends on browser, you should be able to set a limit and it will obey that limit so i dont see why you'd want to delete them yourslef, but i guess you could if you want. temp folder, /tmp, i believe is emptied at bootup so no worries there....reboots - are fo suckazzz!!!!!!

 

[kp1126]

Hey AC, how is it running on there? What version of Mandrake are you using? I put 8.1 on a p200 64mb ram, but it lagged too much to be usable. That was using Gnome btw.

 

[capybara]

kp: the p200 isnt the problem, but i would try more ram , and blackbox instead of gnome

 

[Barnaby W. Füi]

<< kp: the p200 isnt the problem, but i would try more ram , and blackbox instead of gnome >>


i agree. gnome and kde are both like 50+MB, blackbox is maybe 1MB at most....give it a try, i use it on my p233 and its just as responsive as my duron 750 (blackbox, not the whole machine, mozilla on that thing is a joke..)

 

[BlackOmen]

Mandrake may have a little bloat to it, but it can also be trimmed quite nicely. On a Cyrix 6x86 150 with 32mb ram, I would have Windowmaker running Netscape on an untrimmed 2.2.17 kernel (Mandrake 7.1) and I didn't even touch the swap. It is quite do-able.

Otherwise, the ext2, ext3, reiserfs, or xfs filesytems (all supported by Mandrake) have methods which reduce disk fragmentation. The most you'll ever have to do is run fsck if the system loses power with ext2, and that's even done automatically. The most you'll ever have to do is make sure that /tmp and /var/log don't get too full, and even that will take a while. You can do search on google for maintaining /var/log.

As side note: I've heard that using IBM's JFS requires a defrag every once in a while. Can anyone prove/disprove this?

 

[BlackOmen]

double post; sorry.

 

[kp1126]

BingBongWongFooey: How much RAM are you using on the p233? I can't justify the cost of buying pc66 SDRAM chips of the old p200. Also, you said Mozilla runs too slow on the p233, what do you use for browsing then? My p200 is used for browsing by other family members, so usability and similarities to MS I. explorer is the key here. I've found Galeon to be my favorite browser so far is my limited Linux use. I remember seeing somewhere that Galeon was based off Mozilla though....

 

[EmperorRob]

everything's based on Mozilla except like Netscape or a few others. Konqueror's from Mozilla too I think.

Linux likes memory I would suggest taking advantage of the Anandtech discount at Crucial.com if that's still going on. But yeah, using Blackbox or Windowmaker will cut down your mem usage. However opening a web browser still requires some extra mem.

 

[Barnaby W. Füi]

<< BingBongWongFooey: How much RAM are you using on the p233? I can't justify the cost of buying pc66 SDRAM chips of the old p200. Also, you said Mozilla runs too slow on the p233, what do you use for browsing then? My p200 is used for browsing by other family members, so usability and similarities to MS I. explorer is the key here. I've found Galeon to be my favorite browser so far is my limited Linux use. I remember seeing somewhere that Galeon was based off Mozilla though.... >>


i have 256MB in it...totally unneeded/unused, but i had it laying around, so i stuck it in. mozilla is real slow on it, i use skipstone on it because galeon was giving me trouble installing. either galeon or skipstone are both lightweight browsers which use the mozilla rendering engine. the rendering engine is not what makes mozilla bloated, its all the other crap in it. galeon and skipstone just take the rendering engine and put a lightwieght interface around it.



<< Konqueror's from Mozilla too I think. >>


no konqueror is much different...netscape, skipstone and galeon are based on mozilla. there are probably others but i dont know of them.

 

[AC]

Ah. So administration will be a breeze. That's good to know...

I have the download edition of Mandrake 8.1 on there. Just the basic shell, IceWM, ProFTPd, Mozilla and a couple of utilities for around 250MB, very good when compared to a Windows install. It doesn't perform all that bad. I trimed down the services on boot as well to conserve memory. Mozilla is a bit slow to start up, but once, it's loaded into memory, web pages get pulled up really quickly. I tried Netscape 4.78 as well, but Mozilla's features would be more useful.

It currently hosts a FTP server and acts as a workstation for browsing the internet. I'll add in a word processing/spreadsheet package if we need it later on.

Does anyone know of any *.pdf Mozilla plugins for Linux? Do they even exist?

Also, how do you safely shutdown Linux? I've been running the reboot command from root, and turning it off during POST. It seems that users aren't allowed to shut it down at all. They've caused IceWm to lockup, and I've had to reboot from root. Is there a different way of restarting IceWM?

 

[n0cmonkey]

The shutdown command is called shutdown. Its different than reboot.

As far as restarting iceWM, you can hit ctrl+alt+backspace and kill X windows. Nice choice on icewm btw, I liked it before I found blackbox

 

[Barnaby W. Füi]

i always use halt....whenever i use shutdown, it just goes down to "maintenance mode" and says to press ^R for normal startup or login to do maintenance. well, thats friggen wierd, especially when i was first starting out. its been this way when i installed redhat and now on my debian install. halt shuts it down...but i have to be root to do it :/ ho hum

i dont think there's a mozilla plugin for pdfs, but there is a program (prolly more than one) that can read pdf's..


docbook-utils - Convert Docbook files to other formats (HTML, RTF, Postscript, PDF)
dvipdfm - A DVI to PDF translator.
gnome-gv - GNOME PostScript/PDF viewer
gv - A PostScript and PDF viewer for X using 3d Athena Widgets
htmldoc - HTML processor that generates indexed HTML, PS, and PDF.
jadetex - LaTeX macros for SGML to DVI/PS/PDF conversion with Jade
pdfscreen - Make PDF documents which are printable and readable on screen too
pstoedit - PostScript and PDF files to editable vector graphics converter.
pstotext - Extract text from PostScript and PDF files.
python-reportlab - ReportLab library to create PDF documents using Python
r-doc-pdf - `GNU S' documentation in pdf format
xpdf - Portable Document Format viewer for X11
acroread - Adobe Acrobat Reader: Portable Document Format file viewer.
gs-pdfencrypt - Provides support to view encrypted PDFs with GhostScript.

^^^^thats what i found just in apt, do a search @ freshmeat.net

 

[KenCleanAirSystem]

You should be able to set the mime type in Mozilla for .pdf files to whatever pdf viewer you install (Xpdf has always worked fine for me). Look under Preferences/Navigator/Helper Applications to create new mime types and assign the program you want to handle them. Once set pdf files should open in xpdf or whatever application you chose when you encouter them online.

 

[NorthenLove]

<< The shutdown command is called shutdown. Its different than reboot.

As far as restarting iceWM, you can hit ctrl+alt+backspace and kill X windows. Nice choice on icewm btw, I liked it before I found blackbox >>




I use the command init 6 to reboot or init 0 to shutdown/halt my system when I am using the CLI.

 

[RalphTheCow]

I use shutdown -h now. Without the -h it complained about improper shutdown on the next restart. I'd call that pretty picky. It also seems a little strange that everyone says not to run as root, yet you have to go to root to shut down.

My galeon runs great using blackbox, unless I ask for help and get into the Nautilus file manager which just kills my slow machine.

 

[Barnaby W. Füi]

<< It also seems a little strange that everyone says not to run as root, yet you have to go to root to shut down. >>



try "su"

 

[n0cmonkey]

<<

<< It also seems a little strange that everyone says not to run as root, yet you have to go to root to shut down. >>



try "su" >>



sudo

 

[matheusber]

well ... i have a p200mmx and 64MB EDO SIMM and netscape isnt that slow ... but i use Wmaker ... (Slack 7.0)

does blackbox is included in Slack 8.0 ?

i dont like Gnome/Kde for speed issues ... so another fast manager would be great ...

matheus

 

[n0cmonkey]

<< well ... i have a p200mmx and 64MB EDO SIMM and netscape isnt that slow ... but i use Wmaker ... (Slack 7.0)

does blackbox is included in Slack 8.0 ?

i dont like Gnome/Kde for speed issues ... so another fast manager would be great ...

matheus >>



I dont think its included, but it shouldnt be hard to compile it yourself.

 

[manly]

Yes, Adobe Acrobat Reader is available for Linux, including a Netscape plugin.

I've only used v. 4.0x and the NS plugin renders graphics weird (try the weekly ad at bestbuy.com). I don't know if v. 5.0x would change anything.

 

[RalphTheCow]

<<<< It also seems a little strange that everyone says not to run as root, yet you have to go to root to shut down. >>



<<try "su"

How is su different from just logging in as root? Both from the man, info pages, and this excellent source,
http://www.itworld.com/nl/unix_sys_adm/01232002/, I don't see a difference.

This seems way harder than it should be. Here it says to just type the shutdown command and you will be prompted for password. When I do that it says "command not found". OK, I went to root, found /sbin/shutdown, got out of root back into my user login, and typed it in from /sbin. Now it says you must be root. Could it just be a file permission thing? It seems like Red Hat's intention was to allow a user to shutdown, but the default setup didn't give that privilege.

 

[n0cmonkey]

<< <<<< It also seems a little strange that everyone says not to run as root, yet you have to go to root to shut down. >>



<<try "su"

How is su different from just logging in as root? Both from the man, info pages, and this excellent source,
http://www.itworld.com/nl/unix_sys_adm/01232002/, I don't see a difference.

This seems way harder than it should be. Here it says to just type the shutdown command and you will be prompted for password. When I do that it says "command not found". OK, I went to root, found /sbin/shutdown, got out of root back into my user login, and typed it in from /sbin. Now it says you must be root. Could it just be a file permission thing? It seems like Red Hat's intention was to allow a user to shutdown, but the default setup didn't give that privilege. >>



Just use sudo.

 

[RalphTheCow]

So thaaaats what you meant by sudo.

Thanks n0cmonkey.

 

[n0cmonkey]

<< So thaaaats what you meant by sudo.

Thanks n0cmonkey. >>



I use sudo all the time. "man sudo", its great