When I installed RH9 several months ago I was so excited that I went for the full install (including source for most things). I wasn't really sure what I'd need/like and not need/like so I said what the heck.

Well after finally getting Gnome 2.4 installed last night I realized that I am really filling my HD quickly and I need to start "cleaning up".

Question is what's the best way to approach this:

1. "rpm -e" everything you can and don't need?

2. Manually "rm -f" old libs, files etc (scary thought)?

3. Backup important stuff and re-install RH9 but this time with only those things I now know I need?

4. Or some other better way that I haven't even thought of (being a newbie and all).

I know that with Windows I used to just open up control panel and start un-installing all the crap I had installed/demo'd/tried in the past several months and no longer needed. And then of course did a defrag (no need for that now :-)

Thanks!

Number 3. Of course I re-install OS's all the time.

I would definitly say that rpm -e <package name> would be by far the safest way to go. I would avoid manually taking out files by rm -f if at all possible.....you could get yourself into a world of hurt.

If it is something that you compiled from source that you want to remove, it is pretty easy if you put them in /usr/local/src. This is a good idea b/c you can then remove the files from /usr/local/bin, /usr/local/lib and so on very cleanly. RPM's are great for the fact that they are so easy to install and uninstall without having to worry about removing a file that is needed by another package

I also recommend reinstalling, personally, because it's a good learning experience (the Red Hat installer has package descriptions for every piece of software, and tracks dependencies among them).

But you don't have to do that if you don't want to.

The command "rpm -qa|grep devel" will give you a list of development libraries - you can get rid of all of them if you are not planning on doing code development on the box. "rpm -qa|grep compat" will list compatibility libraries, same comment applies.

If it's a standalone machine you can lose anything that starts with yp -- "rpm -qa |grep ^yp" will list those. And you can kill anything to do with nfs or the portmapper... and all the berkeley r-services are evil, so you can rpm -e rsh rsh-server.

There's a good start for you, anyway. But I'd reinstall.

i agree, i think that although it's technically possible to "rpm -e" everything you don't want, it's more feasible to re-install with only the things that you DO want...

on a side note, if you're really into the "feeling" of going into the windows control panel and add/remove stuff, you might like mandrake's control center... here's a screenshot of a piece of it... it lets you install/uninstall/update (among other things) with a few mouse clicks...

http://images.mandrakesoft.com/img/s...ots/90scr2.png

i might be trippin' but i think red hat comes with a nice gui for rpm... i'm not sure... if they do i'm sure someone will post it for you...