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Tag: arch

  • Keep your arch linux system clean and light

    Keep your arch linux system clean and light

    Archlinux is a system that can take a lot of punishment from the user without breaking, nevertheless, it’s always useful to check once in a while your orphan packages to make sure your system doesn’t have unneeded dependencies or packages that no longer depend on any other package, so here are a couple of tips to improve your package management skills and to keep your system clean of packages you don’t want (after all that’s why you installed Arch in the first place).

    1) Uninstall Procedure

    The first thing to note, and I have seen lots of people NOT doing this, is  to remove package using the -s flag, so the package gets uninstalled along with the installed dependencies no longer required by any other package. For example, if you installed devede player you will get these 4 packages installed:

    mencoder  dvdauthor  vcdimager  devede

    If you then proceed to remove devede using just:

    pacman -R devede

    you will only get the devede package removed, leaving the remaining 3 packages in your system taking up space for something you already uninstalled and have no practical use now.

    So instead of uninstalling that way, try this one:

    pacman -Rs devede

    That will get all 4 packages uninstalled with no harm to your system.

    2) Orphan management

    WARNING: Please remember that pacman doesn’t hold your hand, and in some cases might suggest packages in the below method that are indeed useful for you, the method I am about to explain can be dangerous if you don’t have an idea of what you are doing.

    Taken from the ArchWiki:

    pacman is a powerful package management tool, but it does not attempt to handle all corner cases. Read The Arch Way if this confuses you. Rather, users must be vigilant and take responsibility for maintaining their own system.

    With this command you can list the orphan packages on your system, that is packages not required by any currently installed package:

    pacman -Qtd

    Dont blindly just copy the entire list and remove it from your system, doing this without checking first whats listed can lead to aliens eating your comp and pooping it before you realize what is happening.

    3) Using the -D switch in pacman

    This option is famous for NOT being known/used, but it’s very helpful, with this you can keep a list of packages you are trying so you can easily remove them later or keep them if you want.

    To test any given package after you install it, go ahead and do:

    pacman -D –asdeps

    This will tell pacman the package was installed as a dependency, consequently, it will be listed as an orphan (which you can see with “pacman -Qtd”)

    If you then decide that you want to keep the package, you can use the –asexplicit flag as is:

    pacman -D –asexplicit

    4) Knowing what is taking up space in your system

    There are some useful tools for this, one that is distro independent and very useful is Baobab (part of GNOME and included by default).

    This will tell you in a nice graphical way what is taking space on your system so you can take action.

    Another tool (this one is Arch specific) is a script that lists the real size of some of your packages, what do I mean by real? well, say you want to know the size of one of your games, the normal way to do it is search for the installation folder and check the properties for that folder, looking at how much space is taking off your hard drive, but what about dependencies? if it’s a big program, most likely is has lots of dependencies and those take space too.

    This tool will tell you (in order from biggest to smallest) the size of those packages including dependencies, I’m sure you will be impressed by some of the apps that will appear on this list.

    To use it, save the file as bigpkg.sh give it executable permissions with:

    chmod +x bigpkg.sh

    and run it:

     

    ./bigpkg.sh

    I hope that with this tips you can get a better understanding of how pacman and dependencies work, and have yourself a cleaner system to save the valuable disk space for your por….important files.

    Do you know of any other ways to keep your system clean? let us know in the comment section below!

  • Tips to learn command-line in Linux

    Tips to learn command-line in Linux

    command line interface icon

    This post is intended to instruct Linux users to get on the right track to begin using the command line effectively by providing some guidance in the learning process. This is the way I learnt on how to use the CLI and have worked for me every time.

    First things first, NEVER EVER uninstall your GUI (Graphical user interface) if you aren’t comfortable with the CLI, because if you do and you get stuck doing something then you wont have a fallback method and will become frustrated and probably give up.

    Also its important to note that when you start to notice that people on forums tend to give you instructions/help via CLI commands then you start to understand things and you feel better using the CLI. I started with Ubuntu  and all GUI versions of programs, and have slowly worked my way to have a perfectly working file server at work (using ubuntu server, CLI only) and a perfectly working arch for my Laptop. Pretty much all system maintenance is done via CLI.

    Here are some simple steps with simple tasks to get started:

    Learn the most basic commands first (cp, mv cat, reboot, poweroff, man, ls) and get comfortable using them

    The above commands are critical on any Linux system, It doesn’t matter what distro you use, all this commands will be available and MUST be learned if you want to be GUI free.

    – cp is for copying files

    – mv is to move files

    – cat is for concatenating files and print on the standard output

    – reboot, well, the command name pretty much says everything you need to know

    – poweroff turn off the machine

    – man is for watching man pages (descriptions of swicthes for an specific command and how to use them)

    – ls is to view files and folders structure

    Choose some widely used tools and learn how to work with them

    Applications like nano or vi for text editors (nano it’s very easy to use, vi is more advanced).

    You can learn to use vi by using the included tutorial just type “vimtutor”  and you will get a full tutorial explaining it step by step on how to master it.


    Every time you need to update/remove a package, do it via your package manager CLI commands

    -On Ubuntu you can use apt-get to do this

    -On Arch Linux its pacman

    -On Mandriva is urpmi

    And so on, package upgrade/removal is done a LOT faster if you know the CLI commands

    Make extensive use of the man command

    It gives all the required info to know what you are doing, for example if you are going to use pacman but don’t know what the commands are just  type “man pacman” works with 99% of applications. Also you can use the –help parameter (ie, pacman –help) to give you a brief description of commands.

    the –help and man commands are the most useful and will make you learn fast.

    If you follow this steps you will (probably without noticing) use CLI more often than GUI to do stuff.