maintenence of a unix system

[gonzomax]

My wife has a laptop with Unix . She is complaining about slowing down. Is there an equivalent to CCCleaner and AVG for Unix? Is there a disk cleaner that is part of the OS? How about defragging? I have never used Unix but my wife goes to shopping sites, Facebook,etc and is not careful at all. I know Unix is less likely to get a virus but is a virus program needed?

[pan1]

unix or Linux?

[Anne Neville]

Originally Posted by gonzomax

My wife has a laptop with Unix . She is complaining about slowing down. Is there an equivalent to CCCleaner and AVG for Unix? Is there a disk cleaner that is part of the OS? How about defragging? I have never used Unix but my wife goes to shopping sites, Facebook,etc and is not careful at all. I know Unix is less likely to get a virus but is a virus program needed?

Does she do her web surfing as root?

[eldowan]

Originally Posted by gonzomax

My wife has a laptop with Unix . She is complaining about slowing down. Is there an equivalent to CCCleaner and AVG for Unix? Is there a disk cleaner that is part of the OS? How about defragging? I have never used Unix but my wife goes to shopping sites, Facebook,etc and is not careful at all. I know Unix is less likely to get a virus but is a virus program needed?

You may try running the following command from the command line, or a console emulator:

uname -a

This should work for a Linux system, unsure about unix or other variants.
If it works, it would give you output similar to this:

Linux <hostname> 2.6.26-2-686 #1 SMP Thu May 28 15:39:35 UTC 2009 i686 GNU/Linux

Don't knowif this will help, but thats my shot for a starter.

[Fubaya]

What filesystem is she using? Is it firewalled? What is slow, the whole system or the web browser? How slow? Just generally slow or 30 seconds to open a text file slow?

I'm not familiar with all of the filesystems but I'm not aware of any that need defragging. I can't imagine anything needs cleaned either. A virus is extremely unlikely. There's a handful out there but I don't think they work very well. I've never heard of anyone actually getting one.

[gonzomax]

She said it is Linux.

[Derleth]

The most likely thing is that she's running Firefox, which eats memory if it's left open too long. Tell her to close the browser completely (all windows) and start it back up again.

More general advice:

Never run a web browser as root. In fact, the only thing you need to be running as root is a package manager like Synaptic or Add-Remove Programs. If she doesn't know what 'root' is and she's running Ubuntu, don't worry about it. If she does and she thinks it isn't a problem, she's wrong.

She doesn't need antivirus software, which is good because the only Linux AV stuff actually scans for Windows viruses. (It's typically run on a mail server that handles mail for a network of Windows boxes.)

She doesn't need to defrag the hard drive. Linux filesystems don't need that. (Yes, there are pathological use-cases for all filesystem designs. Defragging only works if your filesystem is misdesigned enough for fragmentation to be pathological.)

Don't tell her to clean out the registry. Linux doesn't have a registry. (It has a lot of little files instead, and that never bogs a machine down. (What, never? Well, hardly ever. Don't worry about it.))

[gonzomax]

She uses Firefox.Should she switch?

[Derleth]

Originally Posted by gonzomax

She uses Firefox.Should she switch?

I didn't. I just make sure to always leave Firefox after a while. Configuring Firefox to restore your session when you restart it might make that process easier for her, if she likes to keep large numbers of tabs open (and it sounds like she likes to). I use Tab Kit in conjunction with Session Manager to facilitate this.

Opera also works on Linux and is available gratis as well. It isn't even ad-supported anymore. It seems to handle large numbers of tabs very well.

[Myglaren]

Which version of Linux?
There is an antivirus - Clam - which is more to preclude passing on Widows viruses to Windows users that you may be in contact with.

I have a thing called Bleachbit that is supposedly similar to CCleaner. Never used it though.
There is no disc defragmenter. There are a lot of browsers though.
On thing you (she) can do is to clear private data as Firefox closes, which removes all temp files and cookies/passwords etc if you want it to.
Edit->Preferences in the Linux version of Firefox.

[Anne Neville]

In situations like this, I like the top command for seeing what's going on. You can see if the problem is that something's using up all the CPU time or all the memory.

Originally Posted by eldowan

You may try running the following command from the command line, or a console emulator:

uname -a

This should work for a Linux system, unsure about unix or other variants.

It works on Solaris and AIX as well.

[Superfluous Parentheses]

In my experience, the biggest slowdown is usually boot time, caused by installing more stuff that starts automatically when you boot up. Carefully uninstalling programs you don't use will help with that.

Other things that may slow down things are newer versions of largish applications - like Firefox (which is a long way from its origins as a "new fast clean mozzila") and OpenOffice. Sadly, you really do want to stay current with FF, if only for the security fixes, and for OpenOffice you'll probably also want to stay current, but for simple daily use something a little less bloated like Abiword will probably work fine.

Oh. And then there are the Desktop Environments. She's probably running either KDE or Gnome. Neither are exactly fast, though they are the most polished environments. If she wants to try something snappier yet still reasonably intuitive, she could check out Xfce.

[HorseloverFat]

She said it is Linux.

What distribution? A lot of these issues can be fixed by just updating everything. Most distros have a GUI user friendly update tool. You can search the menus for it. Update everything it finds. Will need a reboot if it updates the kernel.

[gonzomax]

She says 2.6 version. It is a notebook computer.

[Derleth]

Originally Posted by gonzomax

She says 2.6 version. It is a notebook computer.

Neither of those facts answer the question you were asked: Nearly every distribution is using the 2.6-series kernel now, and all distributions can be installed on a notebook.