On 04/17/10 23:08, Alan McKinnon wrote: > On Saturday 17 April 2010 14:59:09 Lie Ryan wrote: >> On 04/17/10 18:47, Mick wrote: >>> On Friday 16 April 2010 22:25:47 Alan McKinnon wrote: >>>> On Friday 16 April 2010 20:29:27 Dale wrote: >>> Blimey! That sounds like horribly_broken! >>> >>> Which cron do you recommend for a desktop? >> >> One question, do you actually need cron for desktop? I installed vixie >> because the installation manual says to, but never need to write any >> cron rule for anything and I don't think there any program I uses >> installs a cron rule. So why bother with cron? > > A default install will configure cron to run > > mkwhatis > slocate > logrotate > updatepciids > updateusbids
I don't install `locate` as I don't have that many files to start with and `find` is more than adequate for when I need to search (and I typically only do searches on newly downloaded file or system files, those that aren't indexed in locate's database in the first place). In a typical desktop system you only rarely actually read logs (typically only when debugging kernel, X, and failed emerge; you don't meet kernel OOPS every day, don't you?), for the rest of the times I could probably live without logging and I can turn it on when I need to examine some logs. A typical desktop system do not update their hardware everyday and running those updater programs manually isn't such a pain when you do (on the other hand I run `emerge --sync` and `q -r` every week, but then I still much prefer running emerges manually). And bash's tab completion is much more efficient for searching commands than `whatis`. So I don't think a typical desktop system gets crippled much without cron (or even logging). Yes, you lose some features, and you will need to manually update system's database and do certain things manually which otherwise would have been handled for you; but if I have to choose between wasting system resources running cron/logging or losing features I use once in a month, I probably would not bother with cron.
