removing unneeded packages

Matthias Sommer

Hello,

I would like to reduce the size of my mandriva (2008.0 one) installation
by removing packages that are not really needed.

How can I find out, what packages I can remove without getting into trouble?

Thanks in advance!

Regards
Matthias

Wes Newell

On Tue, 08 Jan 2008 18:47:42 +0100, Matthias Sommer wrote:

> Hello,
>
> I would like to reduce the size of my mandriva (2008.0 one) installation
> by removing packages that are not really needed.
>
> How can I find out, what packages I can remove without getting into
> trouble?
>
Just asking this, I'd probably say you can't. OTOH, it depends on what you
call trouble. You can remove almost everything if you only want a command
line interface. I'd say it' would be easier just to reinstall and only
install what you want. Deselect what you don't want from the default
install.

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David W. Hodgins

On Tue, 08 Jan 2008 12:47:42 -0500, Matthias Sommer <> wrote:

> How can I find out, what packages I can remove without getting into trouble?

Run drakstats (install the package drakstats first). It has to be run as root.
Within drakstats, select the refresh button. This will extract a list of files
owned by each package, and use the last accessed date, to determine how long
it's been since the package has been used. The resulting list can be sorted
by "Not used since (days)", by clicking on the column name.

This gives you a starting list, of packages to consider removing, but be
cautious. If you have any of the filesystems mounted with noatime, the
last access date will not be correct. I suggest installing urpmi-recover,
which will keep any packages you remove, or update, in /var/spool/repackage,
until you choose to delete those .rpm files. That way, if you remove something,
and then find it breaks something else, it's easy to find the rpm to reinstall.

Another usefull utility, is kdirstat. You can use it to find large files/directories,
and delete the things you know you don't need, like documentation in other languages.

Regard, Dave Hodgins

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Dave Pickles

David W. Hodgins wrote:

> On Tue, 08 Jan 2008 12:47:42 -0500, Matthias Sommer
> <> wrote:
>
>> How can I find out, what packages I can remove without getting into
>> trouble?
>
> Run drakstats (install the package drakstats first). It has to be run
> as root.
> Within drakstats, select the refresh button. This will extract a list
> of files owned by each package, and use the last accessed date, to
> determine how long
> it's been since the package has been used. The resulting list can be
> sorted by "Not used since (days)", by clicking on the column name.
>
> This gives you a starting list, of packages to consider removing, but be
> cautious. If you have any of the filesystems mounted with noatime, the
> last access date will not be correct. I suggest installing
> urpmi-recover, which will keep any packages you remove, or update, in
> /var/spool/repackage,
> until you choose to delete those .rpm files. That way, if you remove
> something, and then find it breaks something else, it's easy to find the
> rpm to reinstall.
>
> Another usefull utility, is kdirstat. You can use it to find large
> files/directories, and delete the things you know you don't need, like
> documentation in other languages.

Yet another useful utility is rpm-find-leaves (run from a command prompt).
This gives a list of the installed packages which are not needed as
dependencies for other packages and can therefore be removed. As others
have said, use with care and take backups!

Dave

Matthias Sommer

Hello,

>> Run drakstats (install the package drakstats first). It has to be run
>> as root.
>> Within drakstats, select the refresh button. This will extract a list
>> of files owned by each package, and use the last accessed date, to
>> determine how long
>> it's been since the package has been used. The resulting list can be
>> sorted by "Not used since (days)", by clicking on the column name.

looks quite interesting, but there are packages, I assume cannot be used
but listed as last used 0 days ago...

>> Another usefull utility, is kdirstat.

That's somesthing I was looking for - where did my diskspace go.

> Yet another useful utility is rpm-find-leaves (run from a command prompt).
> This gives a list of the installed packages which are not needed as
> dependencies for other packages and can therefore be removed. As others
> have said, use with care and take backups!

this is exactly what I was looking for - Thanks!

Regards
Matthias