Unnecessary Services/Daemons loaded at boot
 

Can anyone make suggestions as to services/daemons that are enabled (by default at boot) by most distros that can be safely disabled to save system resources/ in situations where you want to be conservative with resources?

Obviously a system's function/purpose/intended use will determine whether or not major stuff like samba, ftp etc will be loaded.... but there has got to be a bunch of "helper" services that are not completely necessary in most situations (examples would be items such as disk indexing, clipboard manager, disk space watcher, etc).

I was hoping for a list of both the service/daemon as well as where/how to disable it.

any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

T

In SuSE you can edit what daemons are started on bootup through YaST in its run-level editor. There should be a "Help" button or something to get information on what the daemon does. For KDE you can check the .desktop entries in $KDEDIR/share/autostart (in SuSE, KDE should be installed in /opt/kde3/) and ~/.kde/share/Autostart

Process Management takes some time to learn what everything does, as a simple paragraph description doesn't neccessarily tell you all that a given process does or what its advantages/disadvantages might be. For security purposes, I'd recommend caution around any process that's a network service, as open ports are a potential exploit. You can use the nmap port scanner to see what ports are open on your system, and netstat to see what processes are associated with them (if it's not blatantly obvious already).