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I've recently switched from Fedora and I'm totally loving Debian Sarge. I have few general questions after installation that I hope some one can help me out with.
1- When I first installed Debian I was in my office, which uses an http/ftp proxy server. Now at home every time I launch apt or anything else from the command line that needs Internet access I have to type:
export http_proxy=""
How do I reconfigure my proxy server settings?
2- This question is abit more general. I noticed sometimes my Firefox will just freeze the entire system (aka Windows style.) I haven't found any crash log anywhere that may help me find out what went wrong. Any suggestions where I should look? I've looked in most files inside /vars/log/.
3- When I first installed Debian, I installed it bare bones and kinda feeled my way into installing the rest of the system (i.e. X, xorg, xfce, apps, new kernel, etc...) The problem is that I didn't know the best repositories and I'm sure I have allot of left-over packages that I really don't need. Is there any function on apt or aptitude to remove unused packages? If not is there a way to get the system back to bare bones without having to reformat and reinstall the system?
re. 2. Crash reports will almost always land in /var/log somewhere. Try running "ls -lt" there to see the most-recently modified files listed first. If you can reproduce the crash, then quickly switch to the terminal window (or another virtual terminal) for an ls -lt, you can see which file is being written to (*if* one is being written to).
You could also have a terminal window up and tailing any number of log files while you work... ("tail -f /var/log/foo"). That may bail you out if the whole screen locks, and if you can't switch to a different virtual console -- at least you've got a terminal window up with the last log message right there. :)
re. 3. To prune out unnecessary packages, use deborphan and debfoster.
Install 'apt-listbugs' which will give you warnings about any buggy package
you will install next. Ideally, this is the first package to install after X is up
and running.
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