Slimming down MX

[dolphin_oracle]

good question. is synaptic running? try closing that.

[m_pav]

How could we find out again what partition blahblah (root, home, that stuff, can't remember the right wording here haha) taking up a lot of space?

Terminal method -----

Code: Select all

type df -h

GUI method -----
Click MX Icon, take hand off mouse, type disk, hand back on mouse, select Disk Manager, then provide root password

[Bierhundt]

good question. is synaptic running? try closing that.

No, I don;t use synaptic or any of that stuff, just CLI for packages/etc. But after shutting down and starting back up, your command worked out great! Now I've just got English US - no matter what has been said, I watched it go slowly past about 1 or 2 hundred(?) locales as it was upgrading - waste of time!
Now I've got to work on the LibreOffice stuff and see what I can do there. I was looking at the PDF apps, and there's a bunch of them - I think I only need one to read and to create, I just have to research them and see which will do the most and dump the rest!
Still gotta research browsers as well.

[skidoo]

sudo dpkg-reconfigure locales then sudo apt-get install localepurge (answer "Y" to blahblah paths)
At this point, the system is no slimmer.
Upon future package installation/upgrade operations, localepurge's postinstall hook scrubs only any freshly-installed locale related files.

sudo apt-get install bleachbit
Launch bleachbit AsRoot, leave everything except "Localizations" unchecked.
(it's OK, and expected, if the parent item in the treeview ("System") also displays a checkmark)
Click "languages" button in the bleachbit toolbar. In the dialog window, confirm that only English is checkmarked then click OK/close the dialog window.
Click the "X" delete button in bleachbit toolbar.
You'll see its progress in the right-pane & can expect upwards of 22,000 extraneous localization files (120MB+) will be deleted.

======================

Why? Why bother?
On a live-boot system:
presence of all those (22,000+) localization files adds unnecessary overhead if one wishes to use the toram boot option.
On a lesser-specced system, the cumulative overhead of these files can rule out the possibility of opting "toram"
(and/or will increase the likelihood of needing to use slooooooow swapdrive)
-=-
Live or installed to disk:
during each backup/snapshot/remaster operation, the cumulative overhead from handling 22,000+ extraneous files is noticeable.

======================
(For extra, more thorough, cleaning)
After running bleachbit, if you open a terminal emulator and sudo updatedb then locate "Zh"
(and/or "zh") you will find various other, unknown to bleachbit, directories containing localitazion files.
^--- across filenames, "zh" is an infrequently-occurring substring and is the locale code for (?) Chinese
It is NOT safe to blindly delete such files, and (with the excpetion of /.././perl5/../Locales directory) they consume only a few MB of space.
The gobs of stuff under perl5... per my testing, deleting the contents of the Locales subdirectory caused no ill effect, but YMMV.
Also, bear in mind: the cornercase files you manually remove _will_ be re-installed during future package upgrades.
(So make a list, create a bash cleanup script to run periodically, and prior to performing snapshot/remaster operations)

[1E1E1E]

You'll see its progress in the right-pane & can expect upwards of 22,000 extraneous localization files (120MB+) will be deleted.

It deleted nearly half a gig on my system. Thanks for the tip.

[Buck Fankers]

sudo apt-get install bleachbit
...
You'll see its progress in the right-pane & can expect upwards of 22,000 extraneous localization files (120MB+) will be deleted.

Thank you also from me for this tip!
I have plenty of drive space, but since I will never need these extra 22k files, I'm glad there is an easy way of get ridding them ;-)

[Eadwine Rose]

How could we find out again what partition blahblah (root, home, that stuff, can't remember the right wording here haha) taking up a lot of space?

Terminal method -----

Code: Select all

type df -h

GUI method -----
Click MX Icon, take hand off mouse, type disk, hand back on mouse, select Disk Manager, then provide root password

A tool I always use after I install the system and I didn't think of it... *snort*

Thanks, I have oceans of space, not going to bother with the small stuff

[Stevo]

Here's a hint: install "locales-all". It has precompiled versions of all the locales already, so you don't ever have to sit through the possibly lengthy and annoying process when updating of watching them rebuild one by one, maybe multiple times during the update process.

Pros: eliminates annoying rebuilds of locales. Less than 4 MB download.

Cons: 130 MB installed. Not a problem with modern hardware, though.

[Richard]

I just scanned over these three pages, but what I find interesting about removing unneeded apps
is the reduction in the size of the snapshot.

There are some good tips here.

I know that using MX-Live-USB-Maker will create ISO over 4 GB that will boot,
the same ISO over 4 GB will not boot on my preferred Easy2Boot USBs. Didn't help
me to use NTFS format instead of FAT32. So, I like to keep them under 4 GB.

Also, I need to remaster an MX for Kids to use on old computers and like
to remove things that won't be used by the kids.

Just a thought.

[Jerry3904]

If I were going to do this, I'd be tempted to see if I could go the other way, starting with antiX Base.