MY HEALTH

I have an acer one linpus lite laptop. with no cd drive.
i have been trying to nstall various things onto the blasted thing but with no luck. various messages, like nautilus isnt running, thou my file manager is thunar??? wont let me unpack thru the xarchiver, says things like, errors in command line, or something similiar.
anytime that i do try and download something, that doesnt work, i remove it, but thou it looks like the programme may be gone, the space available remains the same. i tried to get the restore stuff from a site, apparently you can send it to a usb memory stick and restore your laptop that way, as there is no drive for the disk. except that it wont go on there, thou it goes somewhere as the space yet again goes down thats available.

i have not come across a machine that is so hard to use.nothing is simpleand just as i think i maybe getting somewhere, nopes, back to the beginning. now as a result i have an extremely slow machine and i have no clue on how to find all the software that shouldnt be on my laptop and no idea on how to restore it to its original state.,

i am moaning, i apologise, but well, ive been at this for a few days and i am now very unhappy. all help gratefully received.
thank you in advance xx (i am nice really))

edited to add, i am a complete novice to linux..... can you tell *grins

 

Have you read the Howto on installing software under Linux?

It sounds rather as though you're trying to do it the Windows-ish hard way, downloading stuff, unpacking it and installing it all yourself; try the Linux easy way instead, where a software management system does the lot.

 

what about all the stuff i know there is there, that i cant see. that isnt in the ad/remove list thing.
anyone???

 

What sort of stuff have you in mind, that's not in the Fedora repos?

Or do you mean the stuff you've installed but can't see to uninstall? How did you install it in the first place? If you just de-archived an archive file of some sort, and used 'delete' in the File Manager, have you emptied the trash?

 

things like..... azureus, i download, install then uninstall but the space on my disk isnt decreasing. there are various other things also. but usually web based.... like azureus, my disk space is getting smaller nearly every day and i dont know why. and yes i have emptied the trash., once i found it. and not everything i deleted goes there. i am heavily confused, maybe i just need to do a re install and start from scratch and put on ubuntu, this is driving me crazy.

 

OK, a couple of thoughts.

First, is it something like Firefox's cache or blacklist file growing? The cache maximum size can be set in Firefox preferences (under Advanced/Network); there's something on macles blog somewhere about restricting, or turning off, the blacklisting stuff.

Second, you could see what files are changing by checking what files over a certain size have been written over a period. This command:

Code:

sudo find /  -cmin -60 -size +5k -ls

will list all files changed in the last 60 minutes which are over 5k in size. Be warned that you will probably get back loads of stuff in /proc which is irrelevant (I'm sure there's a way of avoiding that, but haven't yet worked it out).

You can change the 60 and the 5k in that command to change the time and size, so if you've 'lost' some space in the last 15 minutes, change the 60 to 15.

Does that help?