Howto Clean up your packages
Posted by admin on December 21st, 2007 
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apt-get autoremove
Output looks like below
Reading package lists… Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information… Done
The following packages were automatically installed and are no longer required:
libcommoncpp2-1.5.3-0
The following packages will be REMOVED
libcommoncpp2-1.5.3-0
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 1 to remove and 29 not upgraded.
Need to get 0B of archives.
After unpacking 688kB disk space will be freed.
Do you want to continue [Y/n]?
Here you need to select Y to remove these packages
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February 27th, 2008 at 8:34 pm
Or just use aptitude when you add and remove programs instead of apt-get… it will mark packages that were installed as dependencies and when you remove a package it will also clean up the dependencies.
May 27th, 2008 at 3:53 pm
I don’t like using aptitude because it defaults to automatically installing all -suggested- packages along with the dependencies, which is very rarely to never what I want to do. I don’t want any extra stuff installed, only what’s necessary.
Package dependencies are required by other packages in most cases anyway (isn’t that the whole point of using common libraries?), and even after years of apt-get installing and removing, very little cruft seems to build up. Not enough to worry about having to clean it up, maybe a handful of packages.