• Temporary files which never get cleaned up
• Duplicate files. Maybe those we’ve downloaded before. But never removed after using them or maybe we copied them in another directory aside from the download directory. (This happens to me too. Especially when I get careless.)
• Empty directories. We get lots of these when we move files around.

For us to manage our files, a tool such as FSLint would surely help.

This utility helps you search through your file system in order to find out if you’ve got duplicates, bad names, name clashes, temp files, bad symlinks, bad IDs, empty directories, non-stripped binaries, redundant whitespace. It also shows you what packages are installed.

One of the things I am guilty of is that I keep installing all these packages when I try them out but I forget to remove them and the other files related to it afterwards. No wonder I don’t have as much disk space as I think I should have. And lots of duplicates. Geh. I fail at cleaning up and I hope to change that with FSLint.

The nice thing about the user interface is that you could select which category it should be looking for. Once you have selected it, click the “Find” button and it will give you a list of the files it sees. Once you have a list you could select the files for deletion one by one or you could enter the wildcard for you to select multiple files in an instant.

Try it and see your directories cleaned up, hopefully giving you a whole lot of space left. Also, they have a blog that’s not just about FSLint, but Linux in general so maybe you’d like to add them to your list.

Post from: New Linux User

• ext3 is stable
• ext3 is sufficient for most desktop computing needs
• ext3 is well-supported

I think that by default, most installaions of distributions use ext3. I guess that people sometimes get tempted to try out other file systems. I asked one of my friends about XFS and Reiser. He pointed out that the Reiser3 file system is deprecated according to its creator. I also found a blog entry quoting an email:

Ext3’s performance in some situations may not be on par with Reiser3, but it scales better and Andi mentioned the other day that there is quite a bit of research going into improving the locking and general performance of ext3 going on right now, and since reiser3 is stagnant, I
don’t doubt they’ll pass them soon. – from blog.linuxoss.com

In the comments section, I was able to read other points that my friend mentioned:

• other file systems consume more power than ext3
• stability is more important to the desktop user

I am still reading up on ext3 and other file systems. If you have been reading about them too, please feel free to share them here.

Post from: New Linux User