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Neil Bothwick Has answered 30 problems for 30 years of Linux!

THE BASICS

Q Is a swap partition necessary when installing a distro these days?

A Usually not, but some software prefers to have swap available and it doesn’t hurt to give a small amount of disk space for one. The old rule of double the amount of RAM is excessive though, and may actually harm performance. The same amount of RAM is usually more than adequate for modern distros.

Q What are these man pages people keep telling me to read and how do I access them?

A Man, or manual, pages are the documentation supplied with many commands. They’re read with the man command, so man man gives the man page of the man command, in true recursive tradition.

Man pages are meant to be read in a terminal – you can press / to search them – but there are also online alternative, such as those at www.mankier.com, which are often easier to read, and indexed for your convenience, too.

Q I often see comments like “check the logs” or “does syslog tell you anything”. What is syslog and what logs do they means?

A The system log was traditionally kept in /var/log, often /var/log/ messages, and most programs put information in here. With systemd, the syslog has been replaced with the journal, which can be read with journalctl.

Q I have these directories called /proc and /sys that contain a lot of files, some very large. Can I delete anything to free up space?

A These are virtual filesystems that don’t use any disk space. Rather, they’re a way of examining the internals of the system using the “everything is a file” mantra. You can find process information, disk and memory usage and even a complete memory dump in here.

IT’S DEAD, JIM

Q I get random crashes. There’s no real pattern but it seems to happen more when the computer is loaded.

A Check for faulty memory. Boot from an LXF DVD and select the memtest option. Let it run for at least a couple of passes, preferably overnight, to be sure that your memory is okay. If the memory passes and this is a desktop computer, try a new power supply because failing old ones can cause random crashes.