Is there manual how to remove unnecessary stuff from Slackware?
 

I like to clean distro from different avahi, cups, wicd, networkmanager, speechdispatcher, mdadm, nfs-common and other services and packages.
Here in Slackware are many tools I won't ever use like cdrom, thunderbird, dovecot, kde.
I wish to know how to remove packages with dependencies.
Also I wish to change DM to Slim, because it is more lightweight as I think that native.
I also often use /etc/network/interfaces without networkmanager (with service networking), is it possible to use some other network service instead of NetworkManager? And how to manage services?
Sorry, I just started to read Slackware documentation only read its history, also I know its package manager does not work with dependencies... I still don't know how to control services here.

Alien Bob provides mini ISO installers that will give a you a bare minimum package set that you can boot from and then build up from there by downloading other packages you want with slackpkg. However this is not newbie friendly, so be warned if you try this.

http://www.slackware.com/~alien/slackboot/mini/

The # pkgtool utility will allow you to remove any package you wish. However, as you've noted Slackware does not have a dependency tracking package manager so do take care with what you remove as you can break your installation.


Services are activated in the /etc/rc.d directory. As an example I have nordvpn installed on my system. To make the service active I would invoke this at a root terminal prompt.

From this post, I believe that Slackware is not the distro you are looking for.

Did you really want to resolve manually the package dependencies from Slackware? Or did you expect us to do that for you? :D

As a rookie, in Slackware you should install everything. Period.

Agreed. If you're new to Slackware it is recommended that you choose a full installation of Slackware. When you choose a full installation of Slackware everything works out of the box with all dependencies met. Here on LQ we prefer to offer technical support for full installations of Slackware. If you choose to customize your Slackware installation by removing packages it is assumed that you know what you're doing.

Also agree, Do I full install and learn the ropes and down the road if you want to try it you can start removing packages or download the mini iso I posted above and build up from there. Even veteran slackers can have a tough time when they start removing core packages.

"Unnecessary" packages in Slackware cost ONLY drive space. That's the only possible Downside. Having them in case they become needed is nothing but Upside. Unless you have limited drive space it's wise to keep everything. Unused packages use no other resources so won't affect perceived speed.

hi youni,

as this is a pretty common question, ruario wrote something about it on his blog some time ago

https://docs.slackware.com/slackware..._off_slackware

Actually that's not a bad idea for Youni to do.
A Slackware from scratch is very very appealing if setting up a hardened/minimal server or similar.
And from his post, appears he already knows what he wants to remove.

I'd recommend for OP to give it a go by first installing into a VM.
Once the install and dependencies have been worked out and documented, then move to a real physical device.

Not only.. Some packages one might want to remove are those most frequently mentioned in "security issues", which are by many people not used at all, and which often are networked daemons (and pseudo/invisible daemons) of various types (including massive dbus stuff) which might expose the system more than you want.

Like, if you don't need AMPSS.. Or networking and/or unix port listening KDE stuff, or things like PIM.

I do like it leaner, so i 'removepkg' applications i never use or for which i'm using alternatives. Following is my personal uninstall list in 15.0:

Warnings!

Hi youni,

There is no recommended or official way to remove unwanted packages. One reason I use Slackware is that although Pat provides a full operating system, he isn't a bully about using Slackware in any particular way. To me that is one of the features of Slackware and a credit to Pat's expertise and attitude.

To offer some reassurance about removing packages, I do not think I ever used a full install or a stock Slackware. From the beginnning of my using Slackware more than two decades ago I have been tweaking Slackware to my needs. Slackware tends to be designed to be quite flexible in this way.

That Slackware is not compiled with dependency checking hardly means that packages cannot be removed. I have been doing that for a couple of decades. When first starting down this road, removing packges requires some patience and reading some documentation. Not a steep hill to walk.

Because I actively remove packages I routinely self-check dependencies. A quick way to test is running the following command on all files in all directories in $PATH:

A shell script more easily runs that command.

With time, experience and knowledge grows about removing packages and the process no longer seems daunting.

I also occasionally recompile stock Slackware packages to my needs.

I have several test systems in the house network as well as several Slackware virtual machines. Normally I perform related package manipulations in those systems before I do the same in the production systems.

With respect to using slim, there is an SBo build script available.

With respect to /etc/network/interfaces, there is no such file in Slackware but probably what you seek is the equivalent /etc/rc.d/rc.inet1.conf.

With respect to managing services, there is a pkgtool option to manage some services. Mostly though all that is needed is knowing how to use the chmod command. All system service files are stored in /etc/rc.d.

Slackware is a flexible distro. Do not be afraid to experiment or tinker. Slackware is designed to be one of the few distros that provides lots of breathing room to do this. Using Slackware might require some nominal sweat equity but is not designed as a walled garden.

I hope this helps!

Thank you. Actually having cheap SSD 120Gb with 4 partitions for different os, each 20Gb, need to save space. I've installed ncdu and found these heavy packages:

I will remove without any problems:
#du -hs /usr/lib64/{thunderbird,seamonkey}
234M /usr/lib64/thunderbird
149M /usr/lib64/seamonkey

Can I remove locale package (I use only one or two locales: EN_UST.UTF8 and may be C), also TexLive never used:
# du -hs /usr/share/{locale,texmf-dist}
1.2G /usr/share/locale
496M /usr/share/texmf-dist

I also do not need services:
samba speech-dispatcher nfsd cups dovecot httpd

Also I do not know if these services are running, and how to prevent their autostart on boot:
mysqld php-fpm

My unscientific method of seeing which services are running is...

Look for the rc scripts that are executable (green with an asterisk in default terminal theme), those will run on boot.

http://www.slackware.com/config/init.php

Good luck with it.

removepkg mozilla-thunderbird seamonkey

removepkg samba speech-dispatcher nfsd cups dovecot httpd

/etc/rc.d/rc.mysqld stop
chmod -x /etc/rc.d/rc.mysqld

/etc/rc.d/rc.php-fpm stop
chmod -x /etc/rc.d/rc.php-fpm

I hope that helps.

I followed your advice, but now xfce does not work. I did this

Next has broken my system. Some Xfce4 functions do not work after this

Please, advice something to restore Xfce4? Some applets work like time, networkmanager. And all others do not work like windows, applications, launchers. also xfcse4-screenshot does not react on printscreen.

Please, advice something to restore Xfce4? Some applets work like time, networkmanager. And all others do not work like windows, applications, launchers. also xfcse4-screenshot does not react on printscreen.[/QUOTE]

I tried to run screenshooter and got error:
How to check xfce4 dependencies? is it necessary to have xfce4-panel-profiles or I can configure panel without it?

try

Here's a previous post how to use slackpkg templates to achieve a minimal system with fluxbox/fvwm window managers of size 4.5G

slackpkg templates fluxbox/fvwm

After applying the templates if you want to add the xfce window manager just uncomment a mirror in /etc/slackpkg/mirror and run

You'll need to head over to sbopkg.org to download sbopkg so you can build and install slim

sbopkg has these dependencies (install using slackpkg)

To be able to compile slim you will need these packages from the "D" series (install using slackpkg)
Configuring the network run 'netconfig' and select either Static IP or DHCP it will disable NetworkManager and enable /etc/rc.d/inet1.conf

Note for static and dhcp you will have to provide a DNS name server address in /etc/resolv.conf such as:
nameserver 8.8.8.8
nameserver 8.8.4.4

The following dependencies apply:

firefox since 104 requires the wayland and libXtst packages

firefox requires these packages to play reddit and youtube videos
opus opus-tools opusfile libopusenc lame ffmpeg ocl-icd libtheora libvpx speex libwebp openjpeg

geeqie requires ffmpegthumbnailer

irssi requires utf8proc

hexchat requires gtk+ gtk+2 gtk+3 gtk4 libcanberra

'alsamixer' sound configuration requires alsa-lib alsa-oss alsa-plugins alsa-utils orc speexdsp

slackpkg and slackpkg++ require gnupg, ca-certificates, perl, openssl-solibs openssl

If any program fails to run because of a missing library just run it in terminal the output will provide the library name
you can use "slackpkg file-search <library name>" to obtain the name of the missing package that needs to be installed.

I've told ya! :p

Do a clean full install of Slackware and don't dare to touch removepkg on the next 10 years or so. ;)

The Xfce packages are provided in the ISO /slackware64/xfce package set. The following command will restore those packages:

I hope that helps.

Or you can install openSUSE and you will get Plasma5 in 3,5GB ... :p

Kubuntu do the trick too.

IF the dependencies are solved - and in lovely style of our BDFL, the dependencies are spread everywhere.

I for one I will recommend:

@LuckyCyborg

You are a smart person and possess skills and knowledge. At times you have contributed useful information in this forum. Yet once upon a time you too were a noob. You did not gain those skills and experience without stubbing toes and making mistakes. Just about every single person in this forum has experienced learning episodes like those now being shared by the OP. This is how people learn. OP is being patient and is trying to learn something about Slackware.

You act as though because you have grown beyond noob status that you have standing to belittle and berate people who lack similar skills and knowledge.

Such an attitude is not needed in this forum. Slackware is these days a niche distro and needs helpful people and not the opposite. Please leave the pompous soap box aside and try to teach and help or say nothing at all.

So berate Pat too?

The command I provided the OP is a starting point. Since the OP is wanting to learn how to remove unwanted packages, the command will resolve most and possibly all of the missing Xfce packages. Some packages that reside in the l set of packages might be missing but OP's list of removed packages does not seem to include any.

I'm not "though" but on contrary, from my own experience I have told to OP to do a full install and call a day.

Slackware, like any collection of software, HAS software dependencies and they aren't described ANYWHERE.

This transform Slackware in a beast really hard to tame regarding packages customization.

Additionally, there's NOT the friendly big brother apt-get or zypper to tell you that you can't remove a particular package.

Absolutely NOT. According with no one else than our BDFL, the packages series are meaningless and just some historical remains.

So, you can't use them as "dependency resolution" because they aren't supposed to be used this way. And trust me that they can't be used this way. ;)

True, and OP is trying to learn how to manage such a distro. Several experienced people who have used Slackware for many years know how to manage packages without dependency checking. There is no reason OP can't learn those tricks.

The way you continually belittle and berate people is growing old.

I never wrote that. I only wrote where to find the missing Xfce packages.

I repaired Xfce4 installing all necessary packages
Downloaded all txz from here https://mirrors.slackware.com/slackw...ckware64/xfce/
And installed with
Now everything works.

It was mistake to remove Greybird. It was a mistake to remove xfce4 components xfce4-panel-profiles xfce4-screensaver xfce4-whiskermenu-plugin xfce4-clipman-plugin xfce4-dev-tools xfce4-weather-plugin
But may be Slackware has no strength dependencies on those components?

size of Slackware
 

I am not figuring out how to count how heavy my slackware is?

i know /usr is most heavy folder
It was 14G before my removings.

Good job!

Well, "mistakes" are valuable to help us learn. I have made many "mistakes" in my life and in hindsight few of those "mistakes" are filled with regret. Most of my "mistakes" helped me learn and become more skilled and knowledgeable. I am guessing this experience has helped you too.

Slackware is designed intentionally not to provide package dependency checking. Most Slackware users prefer this design and do not want automated package dependency resolution. Browse the forums for related discussions.

Because of this lack of automated resolution checking, the common advice for new Slackware users is to perform a full install. This is cautious advice, but if the user is sufficiently experienced and skilled with computers then removing packages is not difficult. Just use some common sense and add some willingness to learn. I have many times removed packages in a test environment just to see what breaks and I have learned from that.

Removing the unwanted packages saved 2 GB of drive space. Perhaps that does not sound like much, but remember that removing the packages reduces clutter in your panel menu.

I do not have any fresh stock 15.0 systems available to let you know how much drive space is used. I have a Current virtual machine (VM) with several SBo packages added. The system partition is using about 18 GB of disk space.

At this point you restored your system and also removed unwanted packages. Time to step outside and if possible, enjoy the sun setting. :)

If you simply want to reduce the installed size of the system, I don't think it's worth the hassle. As you can see, you have saved 2GB, with all this hassle so far.

As experienced people like @LuckyCyborg, @hitest, @Daedra, @enorbet and @ponce have recommended, probably the easiest and simplest for you is to do a full installation. After all, there is no glory in using a partial installation.

If you really want a minimalist Slackware installation, with only an XFCE desktop and essential applications, probably the simplest is to install a LiveSlak XFCE created by Mr. Hameleers.

https://download.liveslak.org/1.6.0/...ce-current.iso

This system has about 2.5GB installed, and after updates it reaches about 3.5GB, but be warned that there are many things you cannot do with it.

LuckyCyborg is not a native English speaker and to make matters worse, he lives in a culture that is famous for "sounding offensive" when translated somewhat directly into English.

But that does not mean that he is a malevolent person. On the contrary, as far as I know him, he did a lot for Slackware and Slackers without having any personal interest.

So please be kind to be easier with the labels. If you don't like the way he talks, just don't answer him.

Here's a script I worked out for that. Give it a package search term for one package, a series name for a series or "BASE" to get the total size of all installed packages from the base system.

@ZhaoLin1457

Points taken, thank you.

I do not believe I wrote that LuckyCyborg is malevolent and even commented that he is skilled and knowledgeable. The Slackware change logs note his technical contributions. I apologize if I insinuated otherwise.

There is the old adage about only getting one chance to provide a first impression. New comers to the Slackware forum seek help rather than snarky replies. People do not like having their intelligence and motives challenged. Especially when many new comers are not native English speakers. Helping and patience creates a positive impression. Answer the person's question rather than judging or jumping a soap box.

Slackware is not exactly a favored distro these days. Positive first impressions and actually helping people might improve that status.

Treating people with dignity and respect is not a difficult skill to learn, regardless of what culture a person lives. I have been online for a very long time and am well aware of language challenges. More than a few of LuckyCyborg's posts have nothing to do with cultural differences.

it counts packages size, but there are libs and some other files.

The quick and easy way is to reinstall all Slackware packages, a full install is the recommended way to install Slackware.

As you have already noticed, Slackware packages does not contain any dependency information. Removing some packages might break things so you will need to know what you are doing when removing packages. You will need to be comfortable using tools like ldd to see which dynamic libraries binaries are using. You will also need to be comfortable reading different log files and using tools like strace.

It might also be worth noting that removing some of the original Slackware packages might not only break other original Slackware packages. When installing software from third party providers like slackbuilds.org it is assumed that you have a full install of Slackware.

You will need to consider if the disk space saved by removing packages is worth the time you will need to spend tracing down why things go wrong.

An installation with some packages removed will be a non-standard installation. It will also make it harder for you to get help at forums like this when you report something like "Application Y does not seem to work" and only get replies like "works fine here".

Many years ago, at my first installation of Slackware, during the installation process I carefully selected the packages I would need. Among those packages that I didn't select was a package named groff intended for formatting text. As I would not be working with text formatting but programming my choice was easy to not install that package. It then turned out that I got a system where I couldn't read any man-pages. Since then I have always made full Slackware installations.

regards Henrik

That's the size of the special file system in RAM, where the device nodes are. Only names like "/dev/sda4", not the contents of that partition.

Try this, instead, to see the size of your Slackware install:
There is stuff outside of /usr, too.

If you really need to save space, it could be a good idea to look at those packages which are the largest.

For example, do you need kernel-source?

It's all about your needs and preferences.
As others have pointed out already, removing stuff from a full install might lead to nasty surprises due to slackware's lack of dependency management. But there are a few huge packages (or groups of packages) that in my experience can be removed without disastrous dependency issues:

Petri Kaukasoina has already mentioned kernel-source (1.3 GB installed). Some programs are dependent on rust for compiling, but if you don't need it, rust takes up almost 1 GB. Texlive is another space consumer (>400 MB). And of course everything KDE related. There are a few packages in the xap section that can be removed without creating serious issues, e.g. Firefox, Thunderbird, Seamonkey, Gimp.

Even so, a 20 GB partition is on the small side. If you do compiling, you might sometimes need a few GB of /tmp files with the risk of running out of space.

Replacing your HDD/SSD or adding another with more space might be the best option if you really want to keep four or more OSs running.

FYI I added LC_NUMERIC=C on top of the script, to avoid warning at line 21

Mine is fat :D

If you paid yourself $3 an hour when fidling with your OS, you could hours ago have bought a nice 250GB second-hand SSD...

20GB is only asking for trouble later on...

second-hand ?

a brand new 250GB SSD costs 20$ ...

@youni
You could try Salix.

https://www.salixos.org/

P.S.
That's a full install + some SBo stuff + some alien packages.
That's plus loads of downloaded YouTube stuff & other junk. :)

A clean install of Slackware 15.0 doesn't take up a lot of space, probably 10-20 GB on your SSD. Select XFCE during the installation process. It is a benefit to have the KDE applications, such as K3B and okular.

My Slackware-15 root partition contains 13G with 7.2G in /usr. Yes, it took me quite a bit of work to get there but, as a retired person, I have plenty of time to get things just the way I like them. Slackware-14 took up only 12G, but there are quite a lot more dependencies in -15.

I don't know though if it can be done by working down from a full install. I tried that once with Ubuntu, which does have dependency checking, and it was a disaster. I found it easier to work upwards from zero with -14.2, then copied that setup to -15.0 and added whatever was needed to make everything work.

Install a/ ap/ d/ l/ n/ x/ xap/ xfce/ subtract out seamonkey and thunderbird, if they are useless to you (maybe you only use webmail client for email and are happy with it). Add k/ if you need to compile drivers that require it (famously and commonly nvidia, but there are others) or want to tweak your kernel config. Add f/ if you will be offline and want extra help pages offline. Mostly this should work. Notably you will have no office suite, but could easily add libreoffice from alienbob to get that back. There are many other nice to have apps in kde, but many people use none of them.

RE: Quote:
Originally Posted by enorbet View Post
"Unnecessary" packages in Slackware cost ONLY drive space. That's the only possible Downside. Having them in case they become needed is nothing but Upside. Unless you have limited drive space it's wise to keep everything. Unused packages use no other resources so won't affect perceived speed.

Of course it is possible to remove whatever you want and only install if you run into a problem but considering brand name 250GB SATA SSDs currently
cost from $17 USD to about $35 USD, at least from common US sources, I don't imagine such an expense isn't worth the freedom and future-proofing double the drive real estate provides.

If you have security concerns as someone mentioned it is possible to turn off the executable bit and of the parent and still keep the libraries. A decent firewall, kernel updates, and good online practice should reduce such concerns rather dramatically IF they were any serious attack vector at all to begin with.

If you run KDE Plasma there is excellent visibilty and control of Autostart and any and all services right in "System Settings" which has a decent search function as well as a reasonably well labeled menu.

Glad you could restore your system! That's the pain of tweaking it, sometimes, but mostly there is an easy fix.
Sorry for causing the problem, but yes, since i'm using plasma the xfce dependencies were on my list.

You could have restored the xfce online using 'slackpkg' too, as has been mentioned earlier in this thread.

There're nothing in the slackware preventing an user to remove anything - you could uninstall even 'removepkg' or a running kernel making the system unbootable. Even then, you could restore it by booting with slackware setup disk, which have brief instructions on its boot screens howto boot or chroot into existing system.

I'm thankful for all expert advice here in this forum, being nowhere 'expert' myself.
Happy slacking!

Your response makes me think about fundamentals of Slackware. It should be a system that I can use for build my own world with necessary environment. Slackware is responsible of stability and packages compatibility. Slackware respects standards and avoid usage of non-Posix packages like systemd. Also Slackware is a community.

But I often read here "need to use full install, otherwise things go bad". Sorry, this is not fundamental and such idea costs nothing.

Slackware has disadvantage - it is not responsible of packages dependencies, it forces users to build systems by their selves. But it is wrong to say that full installation is obligatory. Slackware does not obliges users to use full installation.

I am not agree with such a mantra "full installation is the only way".

The real conception of Slackware is that it chooses stable versions of packages and offers proven sets of tools and applications that will never interfer or collide. You may construct your own workspace with this proven base. You may extend system in any direction: programming, devopsing, running web-server, data server, creating media, design, office work.

So, newbie sniffs from full installation, but then it is logical to learn how to cunstruct own workspace, optimize system for own needs. I would like to have clean distro that works quickly, boots quickly, gives me Desktop Environment as soon as possible. Also is lightweight .

To pipe output to sorted columns.

Just my two pence worth but if you are interested install Salix OS in a VM and see what packages they have, look through the configuration files and see if you can learn anything that way.