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blanket_cat
Asked: 2017-04-19 02:09:44 +0800 CST

Meta-package dependency chains

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I'm looking to strip my system down to the bare essentials it needs to be a ".. well rather pretty.." place to get some dev work done. I'm digging through the ~# dpkg --list and am noticing a fistful of oddly named printer drivers for printers I will never use. Then there's the drivers for protocols for systems that as my research yields, were strictly in use in academia, and enterprise like, the late 80's... Basically there are a lot of packages, that I'm confident I'm not going to use cups and samba at the top of my list.

Is there a tried and true method, more sophisticated than removing the Meta-Packages, purging a package, and dropping to one of the ctrl+alt+f# terminals to reinstall it if I break something?

I've had incredible boot and shutdown time decreases, disabling unnecessary services daemon from auto starting, (ModemManager - good-bye), hoping I can get a boost in general file system performance from limiting the number of packages, and files that need to be indexed. I'm running an old system.

Any solid methodology that beats my go to, trial and error approach to gutting the bloatware, would be much appreciated.

apt

1 Answers

  1. If you do not shy away from doing a fresh installation, you could install Ubuntu Server and choosing only the minimal installation. After that, only install packages (i.e. a desktop environment) using:

    sudo apt-get install --no-install-recommends package-name

    The --no-installation-recommends flag installs packages with only the main dependencies needed but without the recommended.

    EDIT:

    If you do not want to write --no-installation-recommends every time you install a package, you can configure the apt-get default behavior to do this automatically by adding the following line to your /etc/apt/apt.conf file:

    APT::Install-Recommends "false";

    To undo this, either simply delete the edited line or comment it out by adding two // at the beginning of the line.

    //APT::Install-Recommends "false";

    See man apt.conf for more details.

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