Baobab is a C/gtk+ application to analyse disk usage in any Gnome environment. Baobab can easily scan either the whole filesystem tree, or a specific user-requested directory branch either on the local system or on a remote system. It also includes a complete file-search functionality and auto-detects in real-time any changes made to your home directory as far as any mounted/unmounted device. Baobab also provides a full graphical treemap window for each selected folder.

When analyzing the file system, it ignores the psuedi File systems like /proc. Hard-links are managed in a different way. The first hardlink is counted as a normal file, while the subsequent links to the same inode device are not counted in the total, but highlighted in the right-hand column of the window (see here).

Install Baobab

There aren’t any 1-click install packages for Baobab and hence we need to install from source.

Install Pre-requisites

opensuse11:~ # yast2 -i binutils make gcc gtk2-devel libgtop libgtop-devel

Download Baobab

Download Baobab from here

To download from terminal

opensuse11:~ # wget http://www.marzocca.net/linux/downloads/baobab-2.4.2.tar.gz

Unzip & Untar downloaded source

opensuse11:~ # tar -zxvf baobab-2.4.2.tar.gz

Change Directory Configure & Compile

opensuse11:~ # cd baobab-2.4.2

opensuse11:~/baobab-2.4.2# ./configure –prefix=/usr

opensuse11:~/baobab-2.4.2# make && make install

This should run the configure script and then compile and install Baobab on your openSUSE. This will install Baobab under /usr/bin/baobab.

It adds the Baobab menu item under “Applications – Utilities – More Programs” in KDE4 or in GNOME under “Applications – Utilities”.

Launch Baobab from menu or from a terminal window. To scan the complete File System, click the FileSystem icon. To scan a specific folder, Click “Action – Scan selected folder”

To enable Auto-detect for real-time monitoring, Click “File – Preferences” menu item from where you can not only enable auto-detect but also select the file systems to scan.

You can also generate a graphical map, click “View – Graphical folder map”.

Baobab is a simple GUI tool for Disk analysis and can smoothly work in KDE4 and GNOME environments. Click here to visit the project homepage.