Tuning your Ubuntu machine with command line-fu

Ubuntu is in my opinion the leading Linux distribution because of its extended support for peripherals and large software repositories. Though, the default installation profile can be a bit heavy since it is thought as a catch-all configuration for a general purpose system.
Thus many software developers have the need for lightening the system load and reducing the disk space occupied by the distribution, along with the Ram eaten by daemons. This guide also works with Debian boxes since it is based on the dpkg and apt packaging system and on standard unix tools.

Let's open the hood and start with an example of unrequired packages. If you search packages that match the name ttf*:

dpkg -l ttf* | grep ii

you'll see the list of font packages installed. This collection comprehends Japanese, Korean, Gothic fonts, and so on till Futurama Alien Alphabet. You may want to remove some of them if you do not understand the languages which are written with these fonts.
Note that sometimes you will be asked to remove a package with a seemingly important name, such as ubuntu-standard. These metapackages are simply empty debs that depend on a large set of normal packages; they are meant as a shortcut for installing all those packages in a single shot: the Ubuntu installer simply requests the installation of ubuntu-standard and the apt system works out the details.

Let's try a more radical way to find space to free on the distribution partition:

dpkg-query --show --showformat='${Package}\t${Installed-Size} ${Status}\n' \
    | grep -v deinstall | sort -k 2 -n \
    | awk '{printf "%.1f MB \t %s\n", $2/(1024), $1}' \
    | tail -n 20

When I say that Unix tools are beautiful, now you'll know why.
This commands chain will show you the 20 packages with highest installed size, so that you can remove them with sudo apt-get remove. For example, I removed ubuntu-docs (hundreds of megabytes) and the openoffice Australian thesaurus (I'm not very keen on searching "synonyms" in the other emisphere.)

You may want to install some very small tools to simplify the management of your system:

• bum is a tool to enable and disable services at the bootstrap (this is actually a graphical tool, if you want you can play with /etc/rc2.d/);
• deborphan is a command line utility which lists packages that no other .deb depends on. deborphan | grep lib shows the list of libraries that are not used and so can be removed.

Remember to execute these commands periodically:

• sudo apt-get autoremove removes packages installed to satisfy dependencies that are now useless. For instance if you install the vlc video player and it requires also 100 MB of Qt libraries, if you subsequently remove vlc the libraries are still there. autoremove will delete such packages: if you want to keep some of them, sudo apt-get install package-name will set package-name to manually installed, making you free to execute autoremove on the remaining packages.
• sudo apt-get clean deletes cached *.deb files which have been downloaded in the past. After a successful installation, there is no need to keep them around.

I hope these tips can help you shrink your distro impact on machine resources. I have a 2 GB root partition on my EeePC, and in my case it is very important to remove packages installed by default that do not have a real use.