Comments on: Cleaning up a Ubuntu GNU/Linux system

By: James

James — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 19:39:56 +0000

6 . Don’t say: “For a complete list of available commands increase the level of verbosity of the help command”
Say more with less words. For example: “wajig --help -v” (or whatever) increments the verbosity of ….

By: James

James — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 18:56:58 +0000

4. You say: “If you want to remove orphaned packages you need to install deborphan package.”
Almost everybody that knows what an orphaned package is, knows how to remove them or can easily learn it from his own system. You should start explaining what is an orphaned package, why would you want to remove it (pros and cons).

5. For many people it would be better to install gtkorphan from the ubuntu uniiverse/admin repositories with:
$sudo aptitude install gtkorphan

gtkorphan is just a front end to deborphan, so it won’t do different things to find the orphaned packages.

By: James

James — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 18:35:16 +0000

Tis is completely useless because:
1. How can you remove “not installed (residual config) packages if they are nor installed”. If you do what you say you will install all the residual packages that you don’t have installed.
2. You don’t explain what the “Remove partial packages” operation will do on the reader’s system. Partial?? I didn’t know there were packages that are partial and ones which are not.
3. Localepurge: “Please note, that this tool is a hack which is *not* integrated with Debian’s package management system and therefore is not for the faint of
heart. This program interferes with the Debian package management and does provoke strange, but usually harmless, behaviour of programs related
with apt/dpkg like dpkg-repack, debsums, reportbug, etc. Responsibility for its usage and possible breakage of your system therefore lies in
the sysadmin’s (your) hands.”

By: smag

smag — Wed, 08 Jun 2011 12:01:53 +0000

Nice post.
Many thanks for your job!

By: ian

ian — Sat, 28 May 2011 14:56:00 +0000

well gtkOrphan seemed to be doing a good job on Natty .. until it deleted all linux kernels & headers … fresh install methinks …

By: punith

punith — Mon, 02 May 2011 10:54:54 +0000

Hey this comlilation contains some info wich can harm your system and nothing of it mentioned here…be careful

By: Marc

Marc — Thu, 31 Mar 2011 18:12:51 +0000

Just the info I needed to keep my PC lean and clean

By: erinmidi

erinmidi — Mon, 24 Jan 2011 08:08:58 +0000

I have just used the synaptic package manager to delete orphaned files, as I am fairly incompetent in the inner workings of ubuntu, I deleted the first set of orphaned files and then some more after.
I seem to have deleted libraries for the shoutcast plugin and also rubyripper is no longer working.

Is there a way of recovering the lost files?? I have tried reinstalling the shoutcast plugin but to no avail.

By: anonymous

anonymous — Sat, 13 Nov 2010 05:43:02 +0000

debfoster = nice
thanks !

By: Ivo Blöchliger

Ivo Blöchliger — Mon, 25 Oct 2010 23:29:26 +0000

If you do regular updates, you may want to clean out old kernels (they kept accumulating). Do a

ls /boot

to see all installed kernels. You can remove the old ones with

sudo apt-get remove linux-images-WHAT-EVER-YOUR-VERSION-IS

If you also have installed the kernel sources, you may want to remove them as well. You see the installed kernel sources in

ls /usr/src

If you have multiple kernel sources to remove (as I had) you can remove all of them like that (your command will most certainly have to look different!)

sudo apt-get remove linux-headers-2.6.28-1[345678]

This cleaned up over 600MB…

Cheers

Ivo

By: Shivram

Shivram — Fri, 21 May 2010 03:57:54 +0000

A superb post. I was looking for something like this to help me clean my Ubuntu 9.10
Thanks for the post. It is really helpful both to learn and use!!

Kudos!!!

By: birkopf

birkopf — Sat, 20 Mar 2010 11:27:01 +0000

My Regards,
I was looking for something like that.

Is there any chance you can post come tutorial about optimizing files, and optimizing memory - basically keeping ubuntu cleen and tidy ?

By: Testeris

Testeris — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 13:56:54 +0000

I tried to remove, thanks for the tips, but still on my EeePC-900 with 4GiB devoted to Linux system I fall short of memory (-200MB left). I remember when I fitted AmigaOS in 4 FD and Win3.1 in 50 MB. Here it makes me question why normal 4 GB are not enough?? I keep all the downloaded files in a separate directory on the 16 GiB Windows disk. Is there a way to removeall the old files, installs without the hard picking what? The tips didn’t clean a lot, just a 100 MB, and the system doesn’t have just the basic things.
P.S. I added .thumbnails directory into the cleaning routine! I’d like to add more, just fell short of ideas.

By: Kang_Edoy

Kang_Edoy — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 10:21:44 +0000

Thank You… Nice post…
I am newbie and I looking for this.
thank you

By: Oguz Sel

Oguz Sel — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 10:23:58 +0000

You should probably not delete a directory manually if you are new to Linux, that can cause a lot of trouble.

Good tips.

By: Testeris

Testeris — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 00:31:34 +0000

Which directory is safe to delete manually? I’m new to Linux, so please be specific

Thanks

By: ad

ad — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 00:27:11 +0000

Spot on - thanks, really useful!

By: flyttst?dning

flyttst?dning — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 14:13:59 +0000

And I thought I knew everything there was to know about this subject…well, now I do - nice post. Charlotte Bell @ Flyttst?dning

By: thiyagi

thiyagi — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 22:06:13 +0000

excellent…thzzz

By: Joe Wilson

Joe Wilson — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 09:21:46 +0000

removing all the gz files doesn’t just logs being removed watch it..