I like to create a rather small Ubuntu installation in a Virtual Box machine. It should basically just provide TeX Live and related tools. I figured now that I have almost 1GB of data under /usr/share/doc
. I don't need this documentation in this case, just the LaTeX related man
pages, which are not located there.
Is there a way to uninstall all these documentation files using apt-get
?
Alternatively, is it reasonably save to just delete the content of /usr/share/doc
?
I like to share the Virtual Box machine with others, which shouldn't run in trouble.
According to the Ubuntu wiki, you can instruct
dpkg
not to install any documentation. This should prevent any documentation (except copyright info) from being installed by apt.Then you can manually remove any documentation already installed:
If you also want to remove the man pages do:
The example is written for OEMs, but it worked just as well for me. Took my
/usr/share/doc/
directory down from ~150MB to ~20MB.This should remove the documentation for latex-related packages:
It does save a few hundred MB.
Quick-and-dirty way to find the installed texlive packages (I'm 100% sure there are other ways):
And removing them:
Do you know what is taking up all of that space? My
/usr/share/doc
is only ~50MB. If not, use the Disk Analyzer application or go to the terminal and runcd /usr/share/doc
; then rundu -h -d 1
to find out what is using all of that space. Once you know which program or program are the problem then you can decide if you should remove the directories in/usr/share/doc
or not.A small modification to mopagemo's answer. If LaTeX was originally installed via
texlive-full
, then removing that metapackage will lead to all of its dependencies being added to the autoremove queue. To fix this, we need to flag the packages as manually installed.Here's a list of the steps I took to remove the docs and remove the desired packages from the autoremove queue:
sudo apt-get --purge remove tex.\*-doc$
sudo apt-get install
all of these packages.sudo apt-get install
again on the smaller list. This should flag all of the packages as manually installed.It doesn't take long to do this, and the benefit is that you aren't breaking any existing packages or dependencies. You could even reinstall texlive-full over the top. You might want to keep a list of the flagged packages if you intend to uninstall completely at some point.
This freed up just over 1000 MB on my system.
If you do that, the files will get reinstalled when any of the packages get upgraded. You should instead remove the relevant documentation packages, which often (but not always) end in
-doc
.