i'm concerned about system maintainence. i frequently defrag and check my disk in all my windows machines. i also clean up all tmp files and eronious data from the harddisk. i am unsure if these are tasks i need to perform on my new linux box. i have searched the forum and the answers to defrag is no. the only real concern i have is wasted space on the harddisk from say tmp files and the like. am i concerned about nothing? please could someone shed some light on this situation ... "loggin in as root for maintainence", as i have recieved this error at boot a few times, but, managed to mangle through it.

You can setup logrotate to manage your log files, etc.

About tmp files. Most will have it cleaned out at boot time. You could also clean them out yourself. What time of system is this, a server that is always running without X or maybe a desktop machine you turn off when not using?

Usually when you boot up, fsck will run to check your filesystem so no reason to do this while your running your system. What type of filesystem are you running?

More details about your system, what you do with it, etc will be helpful in answering your questions.

thank you for your reply. i am running mandrake 9.1 on an old dell p4 sys w/ ext2 linux native file sys. that looked pretty safe during the install. i am running it as a daily desktop as my end goal is to switch to linux completely. to do that however , i have to have a thorough knowlegde of the system first as i often work from home. i generally don't shutdown my pc unless it needs to be restarted (win boxes) or if there is a storm a brewing. as for my work i am an architectural detailer, so i do alot of cad/cam and lots of 3d stuff. my end goal is to run linux as a desktop, but not limit myself as in the future i look to set up my own webserver. my main concern is learning and in my experience system maintainence is a must. thx again .

turns out logrotate was setup at install time and runs automatically. i have not yet figured out how to reset it, but, i am still looking into that (found man logrotate). temp files are being cleaned out at boot. fsck runs at boot. it would seem that this is a maintainence free system. that is terrific. thx for the lead on logrotate i am looking forward to setting up manually w/ more research. what a great set of tools to maintain a system.

Just curious, but why is defragmentation unecessary under linux?

i searched the forum about defrag and came to the conclusion that it is not needed. the best explanation i can give (and my knowledge of linux is feeble at best you may consider searching for this answer yourself as i stated before i am very new to linux) is this link

http://www.aplawrence.com/Bofcusm/834.html

please let me know if you find something that contradicts this info. as i am learning and can use all the info i can getmy hands on, read, abaorb, anything. thx for the response.

I'd have to say that is a good explanation of why Linux doesn't need to be defragmented.

Short answer, Linux filesystem is designed better than the Windows and doesn't get fragmented as quickly and often. You can have fragmented drives in Linux, its just rare and usually very low percentage of your files acutally fragmented.

trickykid thx for the input, i really couldn't find a good short answer. i hope this thread will help other newbies like myself in the future.