With apt and while you're trying new programs you'll get a hell of a lot packages in, like libraries. Now deleting the programs is often easier to remember. But how do you find out unnessescary packages? Maybe something you can search by date with it and which catches the debian packages?

have a look at "deborphan"

sl mritch.

That's very useful! Thanks for the help!

"debfoster" is another useful utility for keeping your system as clean as possible.

And if you want to remove also the config files when you remove a program, do "apt-get --purge remove <package>" (or "aptitude purge <package>"). But even this won't remove the "local" config files for the removed programs in your home directory, so you'll have to remove them yourself.

I usually do it this way:

#apt-get -y remove --purge <package>
#apt-get clean

#debfoster
keep what you want, sometimes after you purge, still there are other libraries pertaining to the app removed, which are left behind. Example: emacsen, after removing emacs21. If you make a mistake press 'u', to change your selection. Do not get rid of libraries you don't what they are, leave them there, deborphan will give you a list of the obsolete ones.

#deborphan
it gives you a list of 'orphaned' libs, to get rid of them:

#deborphan | xargs apt-get -y remove --purge
#apt-get clean

it keeps me under 1 GB of used space in my hd.

Add to that:

#apt-get install localepurge

choose only your locales, choose your locale environment, say 'no' to localized man pages, and 'no' to new locales. It should save you 40-50 MB right there.

Still, like Dead Parrot says, fire up mc, and delete stuff like hidden files, you don't need. Example: i don't use gnome, so i nuke gconf, gnome2, etc

I do the debfoster/deborphan twice a week.

I used dpkg --purge cause apt-get --purge remove doesn't recognize packages I deleted earlier but didn't purge then.

debfoster is awesome Another 122 MB gone now let's see what I broke But well if you don't break anything you never learn anything either.

Wow under 1 GB? Where did I get all that stuff? I have this:

I didn't make different /root (I have barely anything in that folder anyway) but maybe I'm just catching a lot of config and log files. Going to try apt-get clean as well

It's down to 1.2 GB on /dev/hdb1 but it's the lowest I can get. Still that's like 800 MB of useless files.

macondo@debian:~$ df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda1 38G 986M 37G 3% /
tmpfs 62M 0 62M 0% /dev/shm