On Sat, Dec 08, 2007 at 05:51:13PM -0200, Eduardo M KALINOWSKI wrote: > Nuno Magalhães wrote: > >Hi. > > > >Whenever i install Debian, i always use the netinst and select nothing > >but the base system. > > Same here. > > > Then it's apt al the way: first X, then a > >lightweight WM plus whatever i need. However, even with a "minimal" > >install there are always a bunch of packages that i didn't choose and > >that (apparently) aren't used by any other package. > > > > This did not happen to me, though. > > >This time i decided to nstall X from the installer menu, so i got > >X+GNOME. I still had to work around the xorg.conf to get it working > >(framebuffer). The thing is, i'm allergic to unused packages and i > >dislike big desktop enviroments like GNOME or KDE. And i know that if > >i do apt-get remove --purge gnome* there will still be leftovers, like > >Evolution. > > > >I don't think neither apt nor aptitude (or even synaptic, another > >usual leftover) have this, but is there a way to know if a package is > >depended upon? Automagically removing it if not? Actually my favourite > >is apt, i dislike the other two. > > > > deborphan shows packages that are orphaned, that is, nothing depends on > them. I'm not sure if it can automatically remove them, but that's easy > to do anyway. However, I'd do that via aptitude, see below. > > >I'm going through the list of installed packages and their > >descriptions in the debian site, i even have a fortune-cookies > >package! Wtf? And i skipped all the lib* and x* ones... How can i get > >rid of everything gnome? > > > > What I recomend is to use aptitude, and press M (or was it m? well, > whatever) to mark the packages you feel you don't need as automatically > installed. Then if nothing depends on them, they will be removed. You > might want to press 'l' and enter something like this > > !~pimportant!~prequired!~M > > to get a list of packages that are not marked as automatically installed > (that is, they are not a dependency of something else that got > automatically pulled in) and are not marked 'important' or 'required'. > And aptitude lets you see quickly what a package is for. > > Another thing that you can try is simply ask the package to be removed. > If you get broken packages or other things are being removed, then the > package is needed by something else.
If you use aptitude interactively, it gives you a chance to back out of the removal before it goes ahead with it (I think with a control-U). But once you go ahead with it, you're stuck. -- hendrik -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]