There is nothing special for Mechanig as it is just a GUI wrapper for most of the commonly used optimization command. However, it can be really useful if you don’t want to dabble with the command line.

Installing Mechanig

Mechanig is not available in the Ubuntu repository, but you can install via its own PPA.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:kokoto-java/usu-extras 
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install mechanig

Using Mechanig

Mechanig is located at the “System Tools” folder under Applications. Once you open the software, you should see a small window with the following options:

There are two main parts to the software: PC optimization and Software management. Double-click the Optimzation button and you can choose to either optimize PC (clear cache and optimize RAM) or remove old kernels (to free up storage space).

Similarly, you can double-click the Software button to perform all the software related tasks, like upgrading packages, remove unnecessary packages, removing useless .deb files etc.

To make thing even simpler, you can double click the “All Optimization” button to run all PC optimization tasks and “All Software” button to run all software-related tasks. Lastly, there is the “All Actions” button to do everything in one shot.

In short, if you are looking for a quick and easy way to clean up your system without having to remember all the bash command, Mechanig is the one for you.

Maintenance from the Inside

Correctly Clear Useless Files

I am sorry to tell you, but cleaning your trash bin on your Mac doesn’t do the job when clearing files. This clears the files that you have already deleted, like documents and other files, however you must go deep into your Mac to delete the heavy files. This is how you should do it.

First, you should go to the finder application on your Mac.

From there, go to “All My Files”. This will show every file in your Mac.

To make the job easier, sort your files in order of size. This is done by clicking the settings wheel, “Arrange By”, then click “Size”.

As you can see, the files are not only sorted in order, but also grouped by file size. Files are grouped in categories of 100MB to 10GB, 1MB to 100MB and so on. Preferably, you should take a look at each group, not just the larger ones. The larger files are what is bearing down on your system, however the smaller files are mostly cache and saved versions. These may seem harmless at first, but ignoring these files can snowball into a large system stress.

After clearing large files in the Finder application, it is also recommended to check out iMovie files and iPhoto files. Depending on the camera the photos were taken on, these files can be quite large due to resolution. It is important to go to the iPhoto application, clicking “iPhoto” at the top bar and going to “Empty iPhoto Trash“.

The same thing can be done in iMovie as well. All you have to do is go to “File”, “Space Saver”, then choose which rejected clips should be deleted. The clips not used in a movie will be sent to the trash along with its respective cache.

After each deletion, don’t forget to clear your trash. This may surprise you, but all of these deleted files will stay in the trash bin until you clear it. Sorry, but you have to do your chores!

Choosing Useful Applications

Before I took my own advice, I had three Twitter applications, four emailing clients, and a ton of other applications and games. It can be hard remembering to delete unused applications when they aren’t of use for me anymore. There is a good bet that you won’t find a use for multiple Twitter applications and emailing clients either. Instead of having a group of “okay” applications, try to have only quality and useful applications in your dock.

Expanding Your Memory

If you find that your memory still isn’t up to your required levels, then maybe it’s not you, but your Mac. This is where you should consider expanding your memory internally or externally. Apple allows you to upgrade your internal memory for $200, this gives you 4GB of extra memory. If you want 8GB, you can expect to pay upwards of $400. For many individuals, this is well over their price range.

A great alternative is an external hard drive. These usually run between $60 and $200, the size options can range from 500GB to 2TB. So, the question remains, why do people spend so much for little memory? When you upgrade the memory internally, you’ll find that the processing speeds also are faster, this creates an overall enjoyable Mac experience. External memory main moves the files and documents to another venue, not increasing the processor quality directly.

Maintenance from the Outside

Cleaning Your Screen

Whether you’re pointing out a specific fact in a document or trying to swipe off a smudge with your finger, you’ll find marks all over your screen if it isn’t regularly cleaned. If the marks stay on long enough, they can become a permanent part of your screen. Taking the time to have a monthly (or even a biweekly) cleaning will keep your screen fresh and new. Here’s how to do it.

Power Down Your Computer

Find a soft cloth, similar to an eyeglasses cloth, and lightly swipe every corner and inch of your screen. Your goal isn’t to have a complete clean from this alone, it will remove any loose or fresh dirt.

The messes left behind are the heavy marks. This will require a little more work. It is best to stay away from chemicals, they will decrease the LCD’s quality. Instead, get about a half a cup of water and a half a cup of vinegar. Then, mix this solution together to create a natural, computer safe, concoction.

Wipe in soft, circular motions until the marks are completely gone.

How to Clean the Crevices – Correctly

The computer is the center of many individual’s lives. Some people work from a computer all day, others may do assignment, play games online, or perform other activities. This means that we may find ourselves eating near our computer from time to time. The crumbs from the food can get caught in the crevices of your computer. A couple of tools can be used to combat the crumbs left behind. Here’s how to clean you keyboard effectively.

Grab a clean, soft cloth and do a quick wipe through on the keyboard. This removes loose and fresh dirt on it.

If available, grab compressed air to clean within the keyboard. If you don’t have compressed air, a vacuum is a great alternative.

You should then focus on the track pad. The track pad usually isn’t as dirty as the keyboard, however, you should use the clean, soft cloth we mentioned in step one to perform a quick wipe through of the track pad.

The fan should also receive some attention. The fan directly under the screen can collect food, dust and even bugs when used outside. A quick blow through with compressed air or a vacuum will do the trick.

Finally, the ports and CD drive can be blown with compressed air to prevent and remove built up dust. When you’re done, your Mac will be officially clean. Expect your Mac to improve in performance immediately!

Invest in a Case

Now that your Mac is fully cleaned, treat your computer with a protective case, if you don’t have one already. This won’t prevent dust, but it will lessen dirt and keep the outside protected from drops and scuffs.

Your best bet in terms of cases are hard surfaced ones. The rubber cases are dust and lint magnets and can actually increase the amount of dust that lands on your Mac. Hard surfaces, like plastics and metals, provide a clean slate that doesn’t require as much maintenance. A quick wipe through is all that’s needed. Most cases range from $20 – $50, Apple has a wonderful selection, however other retailers may be more willing to give you a deal or discount.

That’s all that is to it. Regular maintenance will show the appreciation that your Mac deserves.

Even though you have a lot of space, you still need to either keep things very organized, or get rid of what you do not need or use anymore. If you simply keep everything and not have some organization to your mess, you will not be able to find anything when you need it.

I know personally, when I have done a little digital spring cleaning, I have found duplicate folders, music libraries and all sorts of other junk I didn’t need or even know I had. Here are a few tips and apps to help fight digital hoarding.

Apps

Using apps like the couple listed here will cut down on the time it takes to eliminate some of your digital clutter. The applications below are only a couple of the many many options available. I have had great luck with the two here.

Revo Uninstaller

Revo Uninstaller is an application that goes beyond what the basic uninstaller built into most programs will do. Revo will remove the registry files and the miscellaneous files associated with the program you are uninstalling. I typically use Revo Uninstaller on moderate mode, the advanced mode can take a long time depending how full your hard drive is.

Duplicate Cleaner

Duplicate Cleaner is just what you think it will be. It finds duplicate files and folders on your hard drive. This saves a tremendous amount of time. You select the folder or the whole hard drive you want to search and Duplicate Cleaner will look for duplicates based on your search settings.

What I like is, there is a setting to have it search for not only duplicate files named the same thing, you also duplicate content. What that means is, if you have a picture named img123456 and the same image named new boat, Duplicate Cleaner will find them and let you choose which one you want to delete.

Pictures

Pictures are memories. Many people record every step of their life in pictures. If this is you, it is smart to have a back up of all your precious moments. While you are moving all of your pictures to either cloud storage or DVD or both, it is a great time to eliminate all of those blurry or pictures your kids took of the carpet.

While moving, you will also want to add a little organization to your hoard of digital pictures. Many people use the date as the folder name. Will you really remember what you did on that day 15 years from now? Probably not. Try using actual names of events such as: Grand Canyon Trip 2009 or Summer 2010.

By grouping pictures into folders with real names, you can find them easier at a glance. If you are backing things up to a DVD, label the DVD clearly to save time later.

Bookmarks

For hoards of bookmarks, I recommend something like one of the many bookmarking services available online. I have amassed a large list of useful bookmarks on Delicious. The reason I am recommending a cloud-based bookmarking service as opposed to the one in your browser, is because there are usually more features in the cloud-based options. A favorite or bookmark is a feature of your browser. Bookmarking is all the website does.

One really helpful feature is tagging. You can associate the site you are saving with other similar sites. For example, If you save Make Tech Easier, you could save it under the tag Tech or Linux. Then when you are looking for that tech article you read but may not remember the title of the page, you can search your bookmarks for Tech and narrow your search.

Files

After you have found all of your duplicate files, you will want to organize them in a way to find them a little faster. Any way you can label, tag or sort your hoards of stuff will help you in the long run. You will not have to search for hours or days to find a document. Tagging files in Windows will help you search and find what you are looking for easily.

While I recommend having your files structured in a way that is easy to find what you need, having files tagged can save you a lot of clicking to find a grouping of files separated into different folders.

How do you get rid of your digital clutter and stop hoarding information you won’t ever use again?

image richardmasoner

Regardless how big the storage space you have in your Android phone, if you do not maintain it, plenty of useless stuff (such as cache, app history, leftover files and folders after you have deleted the app etc) will pile up and affect the performance of your phone. If you have installed and uninstalled plenty of apps, it can be troublesome and difficult for you to go into your phone internal system to delete every single leftover and useless file. 1-Click Cleaner aims to make that process a breeze.

After you have installed 1-Click Cleaner, all you need to one click (or should I say, one tap) to clean up your system.

1. Install the 1-Click Cleaner app from the market.

2. Open the app. You will see a big circle at the center, yearning for you to tap it.

3. When you click the center circle, you will get a prompt asking you to confirm your action. If you select the “do not prompt after”, it won’t show you the prompt in the future.

4. Once it is done, it will show a report of the stuff that it has cleaned up.

Other than the 1-click cleaning, there is also the individual items such as cache clear, SMS clear, history clear or carry out a deep clear.

The cache clear feature will scan all your applications and clean up any cache leftover by the apps.

The SMS clear allows you to easily multiple messages and delete them immediately. It saves you the effort to go into your SMS app and delete the message individually.

The history clear comes in two parts: web-based history and call history. The web-based history deals with items such as browser history, Gmail search history, Google Maps search result and market search result. The call history allows you to delete your call logs.

For the deep clear, it scans your SD card for useless files left over by apps that you have uninstalled. Most of the time, you can select all the items and press “Clear” to delete them all.

It would be great if 1-Click Cleaner comes with a scheduler so you can schedule it to run regularly. When that happens, the name “1-click cleaner” won’t be a fitting name anymore, since you no longer need any click (or tap) to clean up the system. Hopefully that is not the reason it didn’t implement the scheduler feature.

This may not be a fanciful app, but it can be a lifesaver if you need to squeeze out extra space or performance for your phone.

What do you think?

1-Click Cleaner (Android market link)

A good plugin with the merge tag functionality is Term Management Tools. With this plugin, you can manage your terms (category and tags) easily.

Cleaning up your tags in WordPress

1. Install and activate the Term Management Tools plugin in your WordPress dashboard.

2. Go to your Post Tag list (Posts -> Post Tags).

3. The default view is to show 20 tags per page. If you have plenty of tags, it is going to take up a lot of your time switching between each page. What you can do is to increase the number of tags shown per page. Click the “Screen Options” button at the top of the page. Enter the number of tags you want it to show per page. The maximum number you can enter is 999.

4. Go through the list of tags and put a check beside the tags that have 0 post. At the top (or bottom), click on the dropdown menu and select “Delete”. Click Apply. This will delete the unused tags.

5. Next, go through the list again. For those similar or duplicate tags that you have created, put a check beside them and select “Merge” from the dropdown menu. An input field will appear for you to enter the tag name that you want to merge the two (or more) tags into.

6. If your tag list is long, it will take a long time for you to finish cleaning up your tags, but I assure you it is well worth the effort. Nothing is worst than a messed up and bulky database. Once you have completed the clean up, deactivate the plugin. You have no use for it anymore.

7. Lastly, optimize your database and do a full database backup (using the WP DB Manager plugin).

8. That’s it.

You might also want to check out other ways to clean up your WordPress blog.

By itself, the update manager in Ubuntu has done a really good job in performing regular check with the repository and prompts you when there are update available. What it doesn’t do is to remove junk files and clean up your system. This is where 2ClickUpdate comes in. In addition to the regular system update, 2ClickUpdate also removes junk files, cleans used space and optimizes RAM memory.

The following is what 2ClickUpdate is capable of doing:

• ReApt: Updates your package list.
• SmartApt: Installs the latest updates for your applications and system components.
• AutoremApt: Removes packages that were automatically installed to satisfy dependencies for some package and that are no more needed.
• OrphanApt: Removes packages and configuration files which are not required by any other package upon your system.
• AutocleanApt: Removes all stored archives in your cache for packages that are no longer in the repositories or that have a newer version in the repositories.
• CleanApt: Deleting from cache the downloaded packages to free up some space.
• RamCleanApt: Optimizes RAM memory.

Usage

2ClickUpdate is dead simple to use.

1. Go to the 2ClickUpdate launchpad website and download the deb file (make sure you download the 2ClickUpdate_all.deb and not the 2click-update-core.deb).

2. Double click the deb file to install it in your system. Go to “Applications -> System Tools -> 2ClickUpdate”

That’s it. It will proceed to do everything by itself. No configuration, coding, bash command required.

Download 2ClickUpdate

Where do I start?

The first steps in purging unnecessary files from your drive is finding out what you have that you can get rid of! First, check in your “Users/YourUserNameHere/Documents” and “Users/YourUserName/Downloads” (Particularly that Downloads folder) for files you don’t need, or downloads that you don’t use anymore. For instance, if you download applications from the internet and install them, but never clear this folder out, in all likelihood, this folder is chock full of disk image files for those applications. If you have no more use for these installers, you can safely deleted them to get back those precious megabytes.

That’s great, but what about applications or other files?

Another way to find big (and useless) files is by using Omni Disk Sweeper to point out the huge files that are taking up your disk space. Download and run OmniDiskSweeper and you’ll be met with this screen:

Select your main hard drive, in my case, “Macintosh HD” and double click it. You’ll be greeted with something similar to the following, although your files of course will be different:

You can now start analyzing which folders are the biggest and why, as well as what apps you may have installed that you no longer use. Before deleting those apps though, you probably want to install AppTrap. AppTrap monitors your Trash bin and when you delete an application, alerts you to associated files that wouldn’t otherwise have been deleted when the application was removed, and let’s you quickly and easily remove those files.

What about system files?

OS X (and other Unix based operating systems) come with maintenance scripts pre-installed. These scripts are used to clean up system logs and temporary files that your Mac created without you even knowing it. By default, maintenance scripts are set to run automatically so that you don’t need to do anything to benefit from them. The problem though, is that they’re set to run between 3:15 am and 5:30 am, and if your Mac is asleep or shut down during this period, it never gets done. The easiest way to fix this problem is an application called Yasu. Yasu is a graphical interface for your Mac’s maintenance scripts, allowing you to run them, and even choose certain ones to run or not run, whenever you want.

Don’t forget about languages!

Another set of files you won’t find grouped together, but that might take up a ton of room on your drive, are language files. When you install OS X and select easy install, or have the default install when you bought the computer, there are a huge amount of language files installed for languages you likely don’t speak, and probably won’t ever run into on the internet. Additionally, every time you install an application, it comes with its own set of (probably useless for you) language packages. These take up a ton of space on your hard drive.

Monolingual is a super simple application that allows you to simply select what languages you want to get rid of (and it defaults to keeping the most common ones, so you’ll probably be ready to go as soon as you open the app) and then deletes all of them for you. All you need to do is double check the languages (for instance, I kept all the versions of English, not just the most common one,) hit “Remove”, follow by “Okay”, and Monolingual will do all the work for you. After just a few minutes, Monolingual got me back nearly 200MB of room!

Last steps – don’t forget the trash

You may have cleared up some room already, but don’t forget the final, and most important, step - empty the trash! This will actually delete most of the files from your drive, and with the help of AppTrap, you’ll get every last file out of your system.

Do you know any other programs to help with the cleanup process? Or any other tips or tricks to keep your hard drive running smoothly? If so, let us know in the comments!

Image credit: Toronja Azul

1. Delete a file permanently instead of moving to trash

When you delete a file, it will be moved to the trash and remain there infinitely until you empty your trash. If you have completely no use for the file, why not delete it permanently and free up some space?

In your Nautilus (file manager), go to Edit -> Preferences. Under the Behavior tab, check the box “Include a Delete command that bypass Trash“. Click Ok.

Now, right click at a file and you can see the “Delete” button below the Move to Trash option.

Selecting this Delete option will delete your file completely.

Update: Thanks to Carl, you can also permanently delete your files using the “Shift + Delete” keyboard shortcut.

2. Auto empty trash

If you have been moving files to the trash instead of deleting them permanently, there is a high chance that your trash bin is full of useless stuff that take up valuable space. You can easily empty your trash to free up the space.

Autotrash is a simple Python script which will purge files from your trash based on their age or the amount of free space left on the device. You can set it to delete files that have been in the trash for more than XX days, or if you are running out of space, you can get it to delete XX megabytes of files (in the trash) to free up the space.

There is currently no GUI for Autotrash, so everything has to be done via the command line.

To install, open the terminal and type

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:bneijt/ppa

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install autotrash

To get it to your trash that is more than 30 days old, use the command:

autotrash -d 30 

To get it to purge at least 30 MB of files

autotrash –delete=30

To set it to run only if 100MB of space is available

autotrash –max-free=100

A good way to maintain your trash is to run the Autotrash script every time you log in to your system. Go to System -> Preferences -> Startup Applications. Click Add.

Fill up the box as shown in the screenshot below:

With this command, Autotrash will run every time you login to your computer and purge the trash if the files are at least 30 days old.

If you need help with Autotrash, simply type

autotrash –help 

3. Remove empty folders

As you remove applications, delete files or move files around different folders, it will often end up with plenty of empty folders in your Home directory. While these empty folders don’t take up a lot of spaces, they can really mess up your directory structure and become very unsightly.

The find command can display all the empty folders in your Home directory.

find ~/ -type d -empty

To find and remove the empty folders in your Home directory, run the following command:

Important: Never run the find and remove command in root directory. Some of the empty folders are there for a purpose. Removing them might cause system instability

find ~/ -type d -empty -exec rmdir {} \;

4. Clean up Grub 2 menu

The Grub 2 menu is the first thing that you see when you turn on your PC. Whenever the system installs a new kernel, it will add several entries to the Grub 2 menu. After several months of using Ubuntu, you will find that the list of entries in your Grub menu grew longer than your screen can display.

What happened is that when the system updates the new kernel, it doesn’t remove the old kernel. The new kernel is then added to the Grub menu and make the list longer. The easiest thing to clean this up is to remove the old kernel. You have no use for them anyway. Furthermore, kernel files can take up substantial space in your system, so it is also not a good idea to keep them around.

Open your Synaptic Package Manager and search for “linux-headers“. Identify the kernel with the highest version number, in this case, linux-headers-2.6.32-24. This is the kernel that you are going to keep. Proceed on to remove all other kernels that have a version number less than the one you have identified earlier (for example, linux-headers-2.6.32-22). Remember to select the option “Mark for Complete Removal”.

This should remove the old kernels, free up your disk space and keep your Grub menu clean.

What other ways do you use to clean up your system?

Image credit: allen.goldblatt

How to Find the CSS file of your blog template

If your blog is on WordPress then the CSS file is placed ideally in the themes folder under wp-content/themes/yourtheme. To know the exact location, open your blog and check the page source. You will find a link to the CSS of your theme as shown below

If your blog is on Blogger, open the Blogger dashboard and go to the “Layout” tab. Select “Edit HTML” and the checkbox “expand widget templates”. Next, copy the CSS code in a notepad file defined just after the opening body tag.

Download a copy of that file and do the modifications described in this tutorial. It would be better if you take a backup of the stylesheet for if things go wrong, you can restore your site’s design by using the backup.

Optimize the CSS code

Format your CSS code

The first step towards optimization of any CSS code is proper formatting. You should carefully format the style elements and the attributes so that they are easy to understand. Moreover, the code should be written so that they do not overlap with other classes or ID’s. Formatting the code manually is a tough job and you can use the Format CSS tool to get started.

Copy the style sheet which you want to format and paste it in the text box. Next, select the preferred rules of formatting from the right panel.

For example: You may want to insert a new line after the CSS property of each div tag. You may also want to remove all the white spaces placed after a semicolon. Set all the rules which you want the program to perform and then hit the “Format CSS” button. All the specified rules would be applied and the code will be formatted as shown below:

Optimize CSS to remove redundancies

Now that you have formatted your code for readability, it’s time for some optimization. Go to Online CSS optimizer and paste the entire code in the text box provided. You may also enter the URL of your CSS file, if you want.

This tool can be used for the following purposes:

• convert all the RGB color values to hexadecimal thus reducing overhead and increasing efficiency.
• remove all the comments and white spaces.
• optimize the border values to modern metrics. For example: the attribute border: 2px 5px 2px 5px is changed to border: 2px 5px;.
• convert absolute values to relative ones. For example: the attribute font-size:18px; can be changed into font-size:2em;
• converts multiple background, font, margin, padding, list attributes into a single attribute.

Clean Your CSS File and reduce Size

Now it’s time to clean your CSS code for errors and reduce the file size. Reducing the size of CSS is important as it affects the load time of your blog’s pages. Go to Clean CSS and paste the CSS code which you optimized in the earlier step. Select the compression mode as highest and select the options shown below

Clean CSS is based on CSS Tidy and can be used to merge shorthand properties, compress colors and font weights. A similar tool for compressing CSS code for faster loading is CSS Drive.

Some Tips

Following are some tips and tricks you should keep in mind while writing the CSS code for your blog’s template:

1. Always use external stylesheets rather than pasting the entire code before the </head> tag.

2. Use universal classes to avoid repetitions. For example: you can use a simple class div.floatleft{float:left;} to float any element to left rather than using the same attribute on multiple classes.

3. Use browser specific CSS files for fixing bugs. That means, if you spot a bug which occurs only in a particular browser ( generally Internet explorer 6 or older versions), use a separate style sheet to fix that bug. This keeps your main style sheet neat and clean.

For WordPress bloggers: Apart from optimizing the CSS code, you must check out how to reduce blog’s page load time and how you should clean up the WordPress database.

Have you optimized the CSS of your blog template yet? What are your favorite tools for optimizing CSS code? Share your ideas in the comments section.

BleachBit is a software for Linux that scans your computer and deletes unnecessary files to free valuable disk space, maintain privacy, and remove junk. It supports a wide variety of applications and is able to rid your system of old clutter like cache, cookies, Internet history, localizations, logs, temporary files, and broken shortcuts.

Download the Bleachbit installer for your distro. If you are using Ubuntu Jaunty, you can install it directly from the repository.

Once you have installed Bleachbit, go to Applications->System Tools. You will see two options: Bleachbit and Bleachbit as Administrator. As its name implies, opening Bleachbit as Administrator allows you to clean up and delete files from the system folder.

The left pane of the Bleachbit window shows the list of applications that it supports. Put a check on those applications that you want to clean up (Cleaning up doesn’t mean uninstallation, it only deletes the cache files created by the applications). Click on the Preview button to see the files that will be deleted. You can also scroll down to the end of the list to see the amount of disk space it going to free up once all the cache/temporary files are deleted.

Once you are done with the preview, click on the Delete button to wipe out all the cache files.

That’s it.

Double Killer is software that allows you to identify duplicate files (files of same content) and delete them with extreme care. Why do I highlight the term with extreme care? The reason for this is Double Killer checks CRC-32 values of every file and make sure that the file is an exact duplicate before it proceeds to remove it. For your info,  the CRC-32 value of a file is like the finger print for the file and is regularly used as an  important criteria to identify files of the same content.

To illustrate, let’s say I have a folder named ‘E-books‘ in different partitions drive and  I am going to use Double killer to identify duplicate files.

1. Download the Double killer from this site.

2. Unzip the zipped file and double click the DoubleKiller.exe file to execute it.

3. Go to ‘Options‘ tab and set the search criteria. It is important to exclude the system files and any files with extension.

4. Add the directories where you want to search for duplicate files. In our case, I have to select two folder named “E-books” from different drives such as D:\ and E:\

5. Once the required directories are added, click on ‘Run‘ button to start the search for duplicated files

6. Double Killer will then return results for files that have the same CRC check sums and list them based on criteria like size, date modified and CRC value.

7. You can now delete the duplicated files using the Delete options provided in Double Killer. To delete all duplicate entry, click on the ‘Check the last dupes‘ button.

8. Once Delete files in clicked all duplicates files will be deleted and ensure the CRC-32 value for files to safely delete.

Note: On some rare cases, you may see ’0000000′ in the CRC value (as seen in the screenshot above). In such incident, the application is not able to figure out the CRC value of the files for some reason. You may want to check manually if those files are duplicates and remove them from your hard disk.

That’s it. You should now have a cleaner hard disk with little or no duplicate files in your system.

What other software do you use to clean up your system?

Here are 8 ways that you can use to clean up your Ubuntu:

1) Analyze your disk usage

The first thing that you need to do is to find out which files are consuming the large bulk of the storage space in your hard disk. Go to Applications->Accessories->Disk Usage Analyzer and click on the Scan Filesystem at the top to get it to analyze your disk usage pattern. You will be able to see instantly which files/folders are taking up the bulk.

Once you have determined the files that are taking up large storage space, you can do the following:

• decide if you have any use of the files. If not, send them to the trash.
• If you have no immediate use of the file, but will need to reference to it in the future, either backup to a CD/DVD or to an external hard disk. If the file is too big, you may want to compress and split it to several small files for easier storage.

2) Clear duplicate files and broken symlinks

Over the time, you could have dozen copy of the same file lying in different corners of your system. The best place is to hunt them down and eliminate them before they take control of the hard disk.

FSlint is a utility to find and clean various forms of lint on a filesystem, especially duplicate files and broken symlinks.

Install fslint, or via the terminal:

sudo apt-get install fslint

Go to Applications-> System Tools-> FSlint. Add the file path that you want to search. On the left, click on the Duplicate tab and click Find at the bottom.

Other than finding duplicate files, FSlint can also find broken symlinks, empty directories, bad IDs and even redundant temp files, all of which you can delete and recover back your precious disk space.

3) Clean up your package installation

If you have installed and uninstalled a lot of applications, chances are your system is infected with a lot of dependencies files that you have absolutely no use for. Here are some useful commands to get rid of any partial package and remove any unused dependencies:

Cleaning up of partial package:

sudo apt-get autoclean

Cleaning up of the apt cache:

sudo apt-get clean

Cleaning up of any unused dependencies:

sudo apt-get autoremove

A good practice to avoid any left behind is to use the autoremove command whenever you want to uninstall an application.

sudo apt-get autoremove application-name

4) Get rid of old residual config package

When you upgrade a software to a later version, the package of its previous version will still be left behind in the system. You will be able to free up some space by eliminating the old residual config package

Open up your Synaptic Package Manager (System-> Administration-> Synaptic Package Manager). On the left, click on the Status button. You will see a few options appear on the top left pane. If there is a Not Installed (residual config) option, click on it. This will reveal all the residual config package in the system.

Check the box beside the package and select “Mark for complete removal”. Click Apply.

5) Remove orphaned package

Other than the dependencies files, packages can also become orphaned when you uninstall an application. To get rid of orphan files, we can make use of gtkorphan, a graphical frontend for deborphan.

Install gtkorphan or via the terminal:

sudo apt-get install gtkorphan

Go to System-> Administration-> Removed Orphaned package

It will analyze the system and show all the orphaned package in the main window. Check those packages that you have no use for and uninstall them.

6) Keep track of what you have installed

Debfoster creates a dependency files to enable you to keep track of what you have installed. When you uninstall an application, it will check for any leave behind dependencies files or orphaned packages and ask you if you want to remove it.

Install debfoster, or via the terminal,

sudo apt-get install debfoster

Creating the initial keeper file:

sudo debfoster -q

Force the system to conform to the keeper file

sudo debfoster -f

If you have some packages that you never want to uninstall and do not want debfoster to handle those packages, you can edit the keeper file and remove those packages from the list.

gksu gedit /var/lib/debfoster/keepers

To see is there is any orphaned package or dependencies files that need to be removed:

sudo debfoster

7) remove locale files

Unless you have a need to switch to various locales all the time, you can uninstall the unused locales and free up some amount of the storage space in your system.

Install localepurge, or via the terminal:

sudo apt-get install localepurge

Once the installation is done, it will remove all locale files from your system that you have no need for.

8) Clean up grub menu (only for those who know what they are doing)

Sometime when you perform an update, you will find that the kernel is being upgraded to new one while the old one still remain. If you don’t like to see a long list of entries in your grub menu when you boot up the computer, here is a simple way to clean up the grub menu.

Go to terminal and type

gksu gedit /boot/grub/menu.lst

Search for the following lines:

Remove the entry that you have no need for. Save and exit.

Rather than editing the menu.lst file which can be a scary task for newbies, an easier and better way to cleanup the grub menu is via Startup Manager or SUM in short.

Install SUM or in your terminal:

sudo apt-get install startupmanager

Go to System-> Administration-> Startup-Manager

In the Boot Option tab, under the Default Operating System field, pick the kernel that you want to use.

Click on the Advanced tab, check the box Limit the number of kernel in the boot menu. In the Number of kernels to keep field, enter 1

Close the window.

You should see a cleanup grub menu the next time you boot up.

Is there any ways that I have missed out? How do you clean up your Ubuntu machine?