general ideas for cleaning-up and keeping-clean my linux box

Hello,


After several RH8.0 re-install/upgrading attempts, I have
been emotionally haunted by the idea to cleanup and then
consolidate the system. The system now is crowded with quite
some obsolete things I want to remove or update systematically.

For instance, I have downloaded and installed mozilla on
/usr/local/mozilla/mozilla later for v1.4, and I dislike the
presence of /home/bin/mozilla, /usr/bin/mozilla. Could I just
delete them and ln -s the v1.4 to them? Or should I manually
check other libs for possible cleanup? (mozilla is just an
example, I got many executables under /home/sbin/, perhaps
owing to RH8.0 reinstallation, could I just move them to
/sbin/ or what?).

Another set of problem is libs. This is mainly invoked by
the grand updating to sendmail 8.12.9 (haven't succeeded yet).
It depends some libs and then the some libs depends on some
other libs until the glibc 2.3.x etc. Is there a way to
check those dependencies and update them to a higher level
together safely? apt-get IIRC, cause me this night to re-install
RH8.0 (no complaint about apt-get, perhaps network pb etc. anyway,
no data lost!).

In the end, I am tempted to update the kernel. Is it necessary?
(The host runs apache, sendmail, vsftpd. Internet tools are daily
used. Programming languages such as Perl, C/C++, Java etc is
regularly/hobbily used. service such as bind is forseen.)

In the end's end, I am also seeing the idea to upgrade to
RH9.0. After a glance on RH website, it seems that there are
not so much 'computing' updating from RH8.0 to RH9.0, am I right?

And what procedures should I take to prevent messing up (at
least the feeling of) the system. Concretely, I want to update
Mozilla again :-)

BTW, I have a mini concrete pb when starting up: /etc/rd.3/..kudu..
unicode_start not found. What does the error tell? How could I
cure it?


Thanks for your help,
Wenjie