21 Jul 2013
I recently came across a useful tool while reading The Debian Administrator’s Handbook - debfoster.
I use it on space constrained machines, like my venerable Asus eeePC 701 (which is great for travelling). As Raphaël Hertzog and Roland Mas explain:
debfoster has a more elaborate approach, very similar to aptitude’s: it maintains a list of packages that have been explicitly installed, and remembers what packages are really required between each invocation. If new packages appear on the system and if debfoster doesn’t know them as required packages, they will be shown on the screen together with a list of their dependencies. The program then offers a choice: remove the package (possibly together with those that depend on it), mark it as explicitly required, or ignore it temporarily.
Other useful tools are dpigs (from the package debian-goodies) and wajig large. For example:
% dpigs
88963 libgl1-mesa-dri
78624 linux-image-3.2.0-4-486
42613 gimp-data
42128 smbclient
33224 freepats
28731 xulrunner-17.0
26400 vlc-data
23332 libwebkitgtk-1.0-0
22368 vim-runtime
21723 libicu48
The commandlinefu.com topic List your largest installed packages (on Debian/Ubuntu) has some useful commands:
% sed -ne '/^Package: \(.*\)/{s//\1/;h;};/^Installed-Size: \(.*\)/{s//\1/;G;s/\n/ /;p;}'\
/var/lib/dpkg/status | sort -rn
% dpkg-query -Wf '${Installed-Size}\t${Package}\n' | sort -n
% dpkg --get-selections | cut -f1 | while read pkg; do dpkg -L $pkg | xargs -I'{}' bash -c \
'if [ ! -d "{}" ]; then echo "{}"; fi' | tr '\n' '\000' | du -c --files0-from - |\
tail -1 | sed "s/total/$pkg/"; done
% awk '{if ($1 ~ /Package/) p = $2; if ($1 ~ /Installed/) printf("%9d %s\n", $2, p)}' \
/var/lib/dpkg/status | sort -n | tail
The download sources for Eeebuntu seem to be broken, and nowadays I’m generally preferring Debian over Ubuntu, so on my eeePC I’m running Debian with LXDE - it seems to work well.
