Hello,

At work I go through the process of running various software programs to make sure that Windows computers are running safely and quickly. I run programs such as defrag, disk clean up, check disk and various spyware removal and virus scanners. I was wondering if there was an equivalent for SUSE?

Mahalo

Unlike Windows, most other OSes tend not to have file systems that get Fragmented badly enough to really warrent looking too much in to it. Their are tools that can be used, FSCK is a fairly good tool but it should not be run on mounted file systems. Alot of distributions will automate doing more basic versions of an FSCK on boot-up, FSCK is more of a fix any problems or detect bad sector tool tho.

There is no need to perform these maintenance procedures on a running Linux system. I have read somewhere a little while back that someone was making a defrag program for ext2 but it isn't needed. You will notice that a Linux system does not slow down over time the way Windows computers will do. That's probably because Linux kernel developers do not have a financial incentive to persuade you to upgrade to their newest version. In my experience, 13 years, a Linux machine will keep running as fast as the day that you installed the operating system without defragmenting the disks or performing any other preventive maintenance tasks.

Naturally this is one more reason that Linux is a good investment since you don't have to replace your computer or operating system every three years to maintain the same level of performance. :-)

1)defrag - not needed unless you have a habit of filling the HD to 95% or more , and even then there is no real need to do it
2)disk clean up - setup a cron job to empty some log files , but this is auto done about every 30 days on most distros of *nix. Every now and then you might want the thumbnail folder cleaned out .
3) check disk - see above post #2
4) various spyware removal - there is no spyware that runs on *nix -- not needed
5)virus scanners -- there are about 6 viruses that run on nix , and as far as i know non of them will install unless you run as root , and do something very dumb .
rootkits those can be a problem ,but only VERY rarely - install chkrootkit-0.48 and rkhunter-1.3.4

Thanks so much for all those responses! Great to know I don't need to do anything extra.

Mahalo again,