Having only installed SuSE 8.0 a few days ago, I was dismayed when I found that the "locate" command seemed to have disappeared. That's such a basic and useful command that I couldn't believe it was gone. A more careful reading of the SuSE manual revealed that it's no longer installed by default, but can be optionally installed by Yast2 (it's hidden in the "Basic" section as "findutils-locate"). The reason for no longer installing it by default I assume is because of the big performance hit you take when the daily "updatedb" command runs to update the database that "locate" needs. True, I've always found it annoying when performance crawls to a near halt when "updatedb" starts running just as I was doing something important. It runs as a daily cron job - the solution is to cancel the cron job and run "updatedb" whenever you feel the need to update. I moved the script file "updatedb" from /etc/cron.daily to /root, and all is well.