Comments on: Cleaning up your Ubuntu Installation

By: Micky Mike

Micky Mike — Sun, 17 Jun 2007 12:40:50 +0000

apt-get autoremove only tracks packages you installed since the newest version of apt-get (the one that has that feature) but deborpahn looks for all orphaned programs. Also, deborphan will freqently remove things as “uneccesary dependencies” which are actually very necessary (this is especially a problem with audio and video libraries for mplayer and the like). Use both with some caution.

By: Tommy Keswick

Tommy Keswick — Tue, 29 May 2007 04:28:04 +0000

I ran this today repeatedly like this site said to. I noticed some audio and video codecs on the list of packages to be removed, but I thought they may be old versions. It turned out to not be the case. This method removed important codecs. I could no longer view ID3 tag information in Rhythmbox without it crashing, and I could no longer use MusicBrainz Picard to tag mp3 files after running deborphan.

By: Martin

Martin — Thu, 03 May 2007 22:08:43 +0000

After today’s updates I ran deborphan and saw some orphaned (unnecessary) packages. Executing “apt-get autoremove” did not clean out any of those! So I guess deborphan really digs deeper into the system. I never have had any bad experiences with removing packages that deborphan suggested, so it’s safe to use IMHO.

By: Martin

Martin — Wed, 25 Apr 2007 19:59:57 +0000

I’m not quite sure about the differences between apt-get autoremove and deborphan, since I was unable to find any documentation comparing those two. In my experience though, deborphan show me orphaned packages even when apt-get autoremove did not show anything. So I personally, prefer to use deborphan. It has always served me well.

By: Mark Stosberg

Mark Stosberg — Wed, 25 Apr 2007 01:19:48 +0000

What’s the difference between this approach and “apt-get autoremove” ?

By: Mike Hayes

Mike Hayes — Tue, 24 Apr 2007 13:50:40 +0000

Thanks, this seems to work nicely. However, the command “sudo sh del_orph_pkgs.sh” works. You left out the “sh”. Also, how is this different than running “sudo apt-get autoremove”? I’m curious.

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