Memory

[mikewillis]

It's just a netbook, it only has a small hard drive - it's not partitioned.

Whoa, that's either a very old or very cheap netbook if the drive is that small. It'll be an SSD rather than a mechanical spinning one. What type of netbook is it? The only netbook I can think of that comes pre-loaded with SLED 10 was the HP 2133 and I'm fairly certain they all ship with mechanical harddrives with capacities over 100GB.
Putting SLED 10 on a netbook with a 4Gb harddrive strikes me as highly unwise.

But why do I keep loosing room on my hard drive every time I use the internet? Even with deleting temporary files I'm loosing memory fast

One of the packages installed by default is begale-firefox which indexes all the pages you visit or something. I've never worked out why that's helpful and that would use of disk space. Firefox defaults to using 50MB of disk space for cache, you can reduce that but there's usually no point in doing so unless you're running in an environment where you have a quota applied to your home directory (e.g. at University). You can set it to zero, but if the 50MB is important when you're running on a standalone machine you really have problems with your set up. (Which as has been established, you do!)

Um, in an effort to save space I deleted everything beagle from my computer. That seems to have been a bad idea as now I seem to have lost most of my applications and things like the control centre can't be launched:

Um. That really shouldn't have happened. You must have removed a lot more than begale.

Details: Failed to execute child process "/opt/gnome/bin/control-center" (No such file or directory)

SLED 10 by the look of it that path. (And the contents of your home directory.) Hearing about people having trouble with SLED 10 on netbooks makes me sad. I really don't think SLED 10, or even 11, is a good choice for netbooks, not unless you're someone who is already very well acquainted with Linux and dealing with situations like the one you're in now.

Out of curiosity what's the output of

cat /etc/novell-release

Is there any way I can reset my settings to an hour ago and undo what I did? I don't have a CD drive.

If you run YaST -> Software Management can you find and re-install the packge gnome-control-center? If so then you may be OK, depending on how many packages you need to re-install.

One of the reasons I don't like SLED on netbooks is because netbooks don't have optical drives and SLED doesn't have (as far as I'm aware) any repositories online apart from updates. With openSUSE or Ubuntu you can download the DVD/CD but once you've used that to install your machine you can install any packages that are included on the DVD/CD from online repositories rather than messing around putting the DVD/CD back in the machine. This is not the case (as far as I'm aware) with SLED. There are online repositories containing updates, (your machine should be configured to be aware of them when the copy of SLED was registered during installation), but if you need to install a package that hasn't been updated since release then you need to get it off the DVD. Which if you're using a netbook without an optical drive and you don't have access to a USB optical drive, is rather difficult.


Did this mysterious netbook of yours come with anything as useful as a restore DVD? If it did and you can get your hands on a USB optical drive then you can re-install all the missing packages that way.

Top be brutally honest it sounds like you're a bit screwed and the SLED installation is not worth the effort of trying to fix anyway if you really only have a 4GB harddisk. If you tell us the make/model of the netbook I might be able to suggest a more suitable distro to run on it. Eeebuntu maybe if it's an ASUS EEE PC. You can install that off a USB flash drive. (Assuming you are sufficiently skilled to attempt such a thing.) I think your best hope of getting the netbook to a state where it can be viable used in the long term is to locate a local friendly Linux geek and ask them for help. Depending on what type of netbook it is it might even be viable to replace the harddisk with something larger, though using the right distro and being selective about what packages are installed, 4GB should be enough provided you don't want to store a lot of your own files on there.