I have lotsa stuff in my /tmp folder that looks like old stuff I havent accessed in a long time, can I delete this stuff? I have RH8 and using KDE. And how can I figure out what programs are starting up at boot up? Thanks.

How to ask questions about Linux

The original idea behind /tmp was that nothing on /tmp was permanent. Most distributions wiped /tmp clean at boot.

Then KDE started leaving some of its files permanently on /tmp. Leaving the files there permanently speeds up KDE login. If you delete these files then KDE just takes longer to initialize.

My distribution, and obviously yours too, stopped cleaning /tmp at boot so as to have a fast KDE. I also started accumulating junk on /tmp from programs that do not bother to erase their temporary files.

I decided to clean /tmp at every shutdown. I added the following lines to /etc/init.d/halt.local to clean /tmp:
echo "cleaning /tmp"
rm /tmp/* -R

This works fine on SuSE 8.1. The first time I start KDE after boot it takes about 10 seconds longer to initialize. On your distribution /etc/init.d/halt.local may or may not be the place to put the commands.

I read someplace that KDE was looking for a better place to keep its files.

yeh u can del most of it with out affecting any part of us machines performance

Runin rm * as user in that directory will get rid of most of it.

You cannot delete everything in that directory, as various programs use it for intra-process socket communication, deleting the sockets will terminate the apps usually.

What you could also do is issue the "ls -lt" command which lists everything in detailed format and the last time the item was modified (thats the "t" option). The top of the list is the newers files and as it goes lower, its the older stuff.