Advice about removing cruft?

On Mon, September 3, 2012 2:04 pm, Mark Allums wrote:

In an effort to improve system stability without completely
reinstalling, how would someone pick and choose things to trim or remove
from a Desktop/Workstation? My favorite and main Linux/Debian machine
is flaky right now, and I don't want to commit the time and mental
effort to completely nuke from orbit [it's the only way to be sure].
Also, I'd rather not rely on automated tools, especially, but not
necessarily only, apt-get autoremove. I realize I haven't given you
specifics yet, but I'm looking at where best to start, besides just
removing unused packages. Systemic cruft in particular, e.g., daemons
or services loaded that are redundant or silly, such as tracker.

Any ideas?

Hello Mark,

I find the packages 'cruft' and 'deborphan' work fairly well together.
I find Bleachbit to be a little too militant.
Regards,

Weaver.

"The truth is, there is no Islamic army or terrorist group called Al
Qaida. And any informed intelligence officer knows this. But there is a
propaganda campaign to make the public believe in the presence of an
identified entity representing
the 'devil' only in order to drive the TV watcher to accept a unified
international leadership for a war against terrorism.
The country behind this propaganda is the US . . ."


To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to
with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact
Archive: http://lists.debian.org/

On Mon, 03 Sep 2012 16:04:26 -0500, Mark Allums wrote:

In an effort to improve system stability without completely
reinstalling, how would someone pick and choose things to trim or remove
from a Desktop/Workstation? My favorite and main Linux/Debian machine
is flaky right now, and I don't want to commit the time and mental
effort to completely nuke from orbit [it's the only way to be sure].
Also, I'd rather not rely on automated tools, especially, but not
necessarily only, apt-get autoremove. I realize I haven't given you
specifics yet, but I'm looking at where best to start, besides just
removing unused packages. Systemic cruft in particular, e.g., daemons
or services loaded that are redundant or silly, such as tracker.

Any ideas?

What's you final goal? I mean, do you want to completely remove GNOME or
do you want to get rid of something in special?

I only know one way for that which is by manually removing the packages
and being specialy careful when it comes to libraries.

But tracker, for instance, can be easily removed with no additional
drawbacks (well, I had to remove one of the gnome-* metapackages but
other than that, uninstallation was done clean and straightforward).

Greetings,

Camaleón


To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to
with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact
Archive: http://lists.debian.org/k253s3$kaf$

On Mon, Sep 03, 2012 at 03:23:21PM -0700, Weaver wrote:

I find the packages 'cruft' and 'deborphan' work fairly well together.
I find Bleachbit to be a little too militant.

All of the above will find packages that are not being used. But, packages that
are not being used are not loaded and thus not contributing towards system
instability. The OP needs to look at what is *running* and what they are
actively *using* to solve their issues issues.


To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to
with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact
Archive: http://lists.debian.org/

On 9/4/2012 2:48 PM, Jon Dowland wrote:

On Mon, Sep 03, 2012 at 03:23:21PM -0700, Weaver wrote:

I find the packages 'cruft' and 'deborphan' work fairly well together.
I find Bleachbit to be a little too militant.

All of the above will find packages that are not being used. But, packages that
are not being used are not loaded and thus not contributing towards system
instability. The OP needs to look at what is *running* and what they are
actively *using* to solve their issues issues.

Yes, that's right. I have already gone through my system with fire and
sword, hacking and burning through the elderly packages (libraries,
mostly) that do nothing but take up space. What I am looking to do is
make it more stable without doing a complete reinstall. This may
include not only packages that are misbehaving, but also things like
config files, corrupted files, bad and/or out-of-date drivers or
firmware, locating malfunctioning hardware, basically anything that
doesn't work.

I am at a mid-level of Debian understanding. I understand the
technology, but I'm not sufficiently experienced. I'm no guru. I need
good places to start, suggestions about things I may have overlooked, etc.

Any help in this area would be very appreciated.

Mark



To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to
with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact
Archive: http://lists.debian.org/