SUSE & openSUSE

Tips,Tricks, Tutorials,How Tos and Troubleshooting suse linux

Baobab – Disk Analysis tool in openSUSE (GNOME/KDE4)

Posted by admin on November 11th, 2008

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.

One Response to “Baobab – Disk Analysis tool in openSUSE (GNOME/KDE4)”

  1. John Says:

    Good article, I spent a lot of time trying to get Baobab installed and getting all the dependencies resolved on my OS11.0 system. In my research it turns out its already part of the base Gnome package, except its called Disk Usage Analyzer, it should be under Utilities in the Application Browser.

    John

Leave a Reply

XHTML: You can use these tags: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>