How do you keep your distrobution clean?

[Legendary_Bibo]

I don't clean anything. I'm a packrat by nature, even on my computer hard drive. I should save a copy of my /home on my bro's external 2tb HDD. I think my HDD is sick now, or at least it sounds like it when I'm using Gimp and playing music, and sometimes the music skips but I think it's because it has to access the swap.

[townsy]

Hi I am fairly new to ubuntu and I use natty narwhal ,I found this article on a gogle site
which helped me allot I had all sorts of orphaned junk on the os ,aptitude got rid of it via the terminal ,any ways as copied below you may find it will help you get rid of unwanted junk files,


heres the article......

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I am using 11.04 with Synaptic Package Manager (Ver 0.70). When I select 'Status' and try to delete packages from the 'Not Installed (residual config)' option, although I can select these old applications (such as Banshee and Evolution which I don't use) and 'mark for removal', the 'Apply' button is not active and remains greyed out. I assume that I am administrator as I am the only user of the machine and can use the 'sudo' prompt in terminal. What am I doing wrong?

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asked Aug 17 at 15:51


andyt
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That is a known bug. You can remove the residual config files without synaptic using this handy one-liner:
aptitude -F %p search '~c' | xargs dpkg -P You may have to install aptitude if you haven't done that yet.

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edited Aug 17 at 16:21


Roland Taylor
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answered Aug 17 at 16:20


exasam
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sudo aptitude purge ~c is more than enough. – enzotib Aug 17 at 16:30

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after I downloaded aptitude I then used sudo aptitude purge ~c it got nrid of masses of junk files I had accumalated!

[Erik1984]

By doing nothing (cleaning tools and such). Only thing I do is try to organize my home folder and don't leave too much files in the downloads folder, so either delete if I don't need them or put in the appropriate folders.

[handy]

I have an alias in Arch that removes all unused packages from /var/cache/pacman/pkg/

alias clearcache="sudo pacman -Sc"

which I do from time to time.

DotPac, is a great little tool for cleaning up all of the .pac* files that you can accumulate in Arch.

Apart from the above running Arch allows you to only have installed what you chose to install yourself, so that keeps the system cleaner than most distros out there.

Another thing I do is have my /home & /store partitions pretty well organised & I back them up to a ReadyNAS Duo, (which is also a torrent slave) which isn't so much about keeping the system clean as keeping the data in a more secure fashion & using less power as I can turn off my main machine(s) when I go to bed & the little ReadyNAS can stay on torrenting whilst running on the smell of an oily rag (so to speak).

Also, I use Openbox with no icons on the desktop, & manage my system primarily via Worker. This certainly wouldn't suit most users but it makes it really easy for me to see my directory structure & its contents & to operate on it however I desire.

[wojox]

[Gremlinzzz]

Bleachbit in root

[IWantFroyo]

I just have a seperate /home partition. Whenever my system gets horribly bloated, I install another distro.

I follow the progress of multiple distros (openSUSE, Fedora, eOS, #!, Debian, etc.), so it's too easy to switch when a new version comes out. Only takes a few minutes.

Most of the time, I end up installing something else before my computer can even get some healthy clunk on it.

[ilovelinux33467]

On Fedora I just run

su -c 'yum clean all'

Which cleans cached rpms, package headers, metadata, cached data from rpmdb and yum's sqlite cache used for access to the metadata.

[galacticaboy]

+1