Unnecessary applications and services for laptop

taytong888 · May 8, 2010, 3:48pm

Hi,

To conserve valuable disk space in my laptop, I would appreciate your letting me know which applications and services are not essential or absolutely necessary.

Thanks a lot for your help.

DenverD · May 8, 2010, 4:54pm

taytong888 wrote:
> To conserve valuable disk space in my laptop, I would appreciate your
> letting me know which applications and services are not essential or
> absolutely necessary.

with the exception of your personal data, all parts which exist on
a non-Linux file system are not essential
all data not used constantly can be saved to an external archive
(like a DVD(s), CD(s), off site/cloud storage) and accessed as needed…
now, as for which linux applications and services are not
essential we would need to know exactly which are essential to you…

but, you didn’t tell us if (for example) a browser is essential or
not, or if you need to ssh into your machine or not, or if you must
have very accurate time or not…so, we don’t know if you can delete
your browser, or the ssh demon running as a service, or the ntp
service to keep your clock on time, or etc etc etc etc

so, tell us everything you use your machine for, and list all the
programs you need to keep…and then we might have a chance to tell
you what you may delete (hmmm, just make your list and then delete all
else)…

taytong888 · May 8, 2010, 5:08pm

Hi,

I use this laptop just for simple word processing, emails and casual web browsing, but no printing.

DenverD · May 8, 2010, 5:42pm

DenverD wrote:
> 1. with the exception of your personal data, all parts which exist on
> a non-Linux file system are not essential

edit: by that i meant that all (if any) Windows C:, D:, E:, and etc
drives and all associated fat, fat32, ntfs and etc drives are totally
non-essential and counter productive…not to mention their programs
and operating system overly costly and VERY bloated…

ymmv…and, read my caveat…

DenverD · May 8, 2010, 6:04pm

taytong888 wrote:
> I use this laptop just for simple word processing, emails and casual
> web browsing, but no printing.

NOTE: do NOT delete or turn off stuff until after you have read the
caveat in my sig!

open YaST > Software > Software Management and search for and mark to
remove all but one (your favorite) browser, your favorite word
processor (which do you use? AbiWord, or something like that is a lot
smaller than a full install of OpenOffice–others mentioned here
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Linux_word_processors>), all
games, all but one email client [pine is probably the smallest, but
pure CLI], all image viewers and manipulators, all PDF viewers and
makers, cups, all music/video/multimedia players (VLC, Amarok,
Banshee, Kaffeine, Totem, MPlayer and etc etc etc

as for services you need to do a lot of research! in YaST “Network
Services” you can turn off (if you don’t need them and i do not know
if you do or not, YOU must do the research) NTP, NFS Client, NIS,
Samba, Windows Domain Membership, Remote administration…

and, in YaST > “Network Services” > Network Services (xinetd) you will
find a LONG list of network services you may be able to do without, OR
maybe you cannot do without, depending on your system and its
needs…i can tell you i run only 11 on that list…but, if you must
have 6 or 26 i can’t tell you that…

Lord_Emsworth · May 10, 2010, 7:07am

You might want to go into YaST’s software management and have a look at the size of the various packages that you have installed. You can get it to list you all the packages installed sorted by size.

Anyway, uninstalling localizations and help files in laguages that you don’t need may be the most promising when it comes to preserving disk space.

knurpht · May 10, 2010, 1:24pm

Explained and calculated on this a thousand times. If you did a default install and want to use a desktop, there’s not much space you can save. Should not be a problem anyway, since laptops are designed for the ‘it just works’ OS, which is, installed without any apps/language files, much larger than your openSUSE OS.
Or is the problem another one, and did you not reserver enough space for the root partition?