As much as I would like to discuss the importance of cleaning ones package for good health reasons. I choose to refrain this time around. I will talk about something which is just as worthwhile as cleaning one’s own package. When you install / uninstall new apps you may have packages left over which take up space. Just as you are used to running commands such as app-get update or upgrade, apt-get install <package name here>, apt-get remove <packager name here> there is another command which is useful. By running the command apt-get autoremove you can remove packages that wee automatically install and that are no longer required.
When you run the above command you will notice the system checks what packages will be REMOVED and also informs you of the disk space that will be freed during this cleanup. Choose the option [Y] and you are all set. Clean as a whistle. Remember to always have backup of your system, just in case something goes wrong.
When run it looks something like this:
root@mediaserver:~# apt-get autoremove
Reading package lists… Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information… Done
The following packages will be REMOVED:
linux-headers-2.6.32-21 linux-headers-2.6.32-21-generic
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 2 to remove and 17 not upgraded.
After this operation, 85.2MB disk space will be freed.
Do you want to continue [Y/n]? Y
(Reading database … 149643 files and directories currently installed.)
Removing linux-headers-2.6.32-21-generic …
Removing linux-headers-2.6.32-21 …