Trimming the fat off an installation

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On 05/10/07 01:23, andy wrote:
> Dear all
>
> As a Debian n00b I enthusiastically gorged myself on the wonders and
> ease of apt-get. Now, having recovered from my initial over-indulgence,
> like one considers one's post-festive waistline, I am wanting to figure
> out a way to rid myself of packages that I don't use, orphan files, and
> other random bits of software detritus.
>
> I am running an Etch -> Lenny, and have deborphan installed. I am very
> wary of just launching into it though because it seemed to call up a lot
> of files and I don't - obviously - want to break anything.
>
> Can someone point me in the direction of some guides/pointers that are
> current and reliable, or even share some personal experiences of
> trimming down the "fat".
>
> Many thanks for any help.

Troll thru your GUI's Application menu for apps that you know you'll
never use is also helpful.

After you do that, run gtkorphan and be semi-aggressive about what
you zap, but also rely on the "simulate" option so that your bad
judgment doesn't hose you.

- --
Ron Johnson, Jr.
Jefferson LA USA

Give a man a fish, and he eats for a day.
Hit him with a fish, and he goes away for good!

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On Thu, May 10, 2007 at 07:23:27AM +0100, andy wrote:
> Dear all
>
> As a Debian n00b I enthusiastically gorged myself on the wonders and
> ease of apt-get. Now, having recovered from my initial over-indulgence,
> like one considers one's post-festive waistline, I am wanting to figure
> out a way to rid myself of packages that I don't use, orphan files, and
> other random bits of software detritus.
>
> I am running an Etch -> Lenny, and have deborphan installed. I am very
> wary of just launching into it though because it seemed to call up a lot
> of files and I don't - obviously - want to break anything.
>
> Can someone point me in the direction of some guides/pointers that are
> current and reliable, or even share some personal experiences of
> trimming down the "fat".
>

Add one more package: aptitude-doc.

Read the manual.

Search this list on using aptitude interactivly.

Use aptitude interactively and go through each package, having only
those packages that _you_ want installed as manual (no 'A') and
everthing else marked as automaticlly installed to meet dependencies
('A') flag. Also, adjust the options so that recommends are marked for
automatic install.

You can hit 'g' at any time to see what it wants to do, and edit that to
fine tune it, hit 'q' to go back to the main listing and tweak some
more, hit 'g' again, verify that it will only do what you want, hit 'g'
again to confirm. Sit back and watch your computer's waist line shrink
amazingly.

After that, any package you select will bring in its depends and if you
remove it, all those packages that are no longer needed are removed as
well.

Doug.

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andy wrote:
> Dear all
>
> As a Debian n00b I enthusiastically gorged myself on the wonders and
> ease of apt-get. Now, having recovered from my initial over-indulgence,
> like one considers one's post-festive waistline, I am wanting to figure
> out a way to rid myself of packages that I don't use, orphan files, and
> other random bits of software detritus.
>
> I am running an Etch -> Lenny, and have deborphan installed. I am very
> wary of just launching into it though because it seemed to call up a lot
> of files and I don't - obviously - want to break anything.
>
> Can someone point me in the direction of some guides/pointers that are
> current and reliable, or even share some personal experiences of
> trimming down the "fat".
>
> Many thanks for any help.
>
> Andy
>

What I ended up doing is creating a script to install my system. That
script has exactly what I want and I keep updating it.
But it will take time to do installs and finding out what is missing or
superfluous

Hugo

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On Thu, 2007-05-10 at 07:23 +0100, andy wrote:
> I am wanting to figure
> out a way to rid myself of packages that I don't use, orphan files, and
> other random bits of software detritus.

If you have popularity-contest installed and have been running it for a
while you can use it to filter out seldom or never used packages.

There's even a script included, popcon-largest-unused, for listing
unused packages by size.

--
Cheers,
Sven Arvidsson
http://www.whiz.se
PGP Key ID 760BDD22