I am running Linux Mint-13 and connected to internet through a wired connection without any proxy. I need internet for web browsing and system updating only and I am not running any server. When I run the command 'netstat -apute' dnsmasq is always active, as is dhclient. From http://wiki.debian.org/HowTo/dnsmasq : "Dnsmasq is a lightweight, easy to configure, DNS forwarder and DHCP server." When I tried to uninstall dnsmasq, I was informed that network-manager and network-manager-gnome packages will also be removed. I am worried that the network may break if remove dnsmasq. Is there any way I can get rid of dnsmasq (uninstall it or at least have it not running all the time)? Thanks for your help.

it handles your dns requests, leave it be.

Why do I not see it on other Linux distributions? Can I set up the installation without it?

you can, but it's being increasingly used in new distros in close conjunction to network manager, which is receiving the DNS IP addresses via DHCP. Conventionally those details would be slung into /etc/resolv.conf but NM is doing some clever crazy magic and firing up dnsmasq to provide a local caching dns proxy instead of using resolv.conf. if you're statically wired and such, then you'd rip out NM and all that and hard code things, but it does sseem to do a very good job of providing the DNS hooks. What's your actual motivation to want to stop it? It's pretty harmless and benign.

I want to keep things simple, to have minimum number of packages, avoid any unnecessary packages and especially have as few programs connected to internet as possible (as seen by command 'sudo netstat -apute') so as to minimize the security risk. Thanks for your expert advice.

@acid_kewpie: I addition to answer to the question in above post, I would also like to know why you prefer rpm-based distributions and not deb-based ones?

Because it's what I started with, and what real enterprise businesses run internally. I'm actually running mint at home now since last week when I had to get a new hard drive and it's fine by me.

Thanks for the insight.